Nine Montgomery County Public Schools seniors from six high schools have been awarded corporate-sponsored National Merit Scholarships.

The students are among 24 high school seniors in Maryland and 1,000 high school seniors nationwide to be selected in the first group of winners in the 57th annual National Merit Scholarship Program. They were selected from a pool of 16,000 students who advanced to the finalist level in the National Merit Scholarship competition and met the criteria of their scholarship sponsors.

Corporate sponsors provide National Merit Scholarships for finalists who are children of their employees, who reside in the communities they serve, or who plan to pursue college majors and careers the sponsor wishes to support.

The MCPS winners and their intended fields of study are:

Montgomery Blair High School in Silver Spring: Frederic Koehler, computer science, and Sherman K. Leung, biology.

Winston Churchill High School in Rockville: Cindy B. Zheng, medicine.

Richard Montgomery High School in Rockville: Aaron B. Berman, international relations and Roger R. Wang, engineering.

Springbrook High School in Silver Spring: Nicole A. Mair, medicine.

Walt Whitman High School in Bethesda: Jacob Lampl Taswell, science.

Walter Johnson High School in Bethesda: Caldwell S. Clark, engineering, and Russell L. Horowitz, mathematics.