In 1985 Balu Natarajan of Chicago, Illinois, became the first Indian-American to win the Scripps National Spelling Bee. Since 1985 ten additional Indian-Americans have won the championship: Rageshree Ramachandran (1987), Nupur Lala (1999), George Thampy (2000), Pratyush Buddiga (2002), Sai Gunturi (2003), Anurag Kashyap (2005), Sameer Mishra (2008), Kavya Shivashankar (2009), Anamika Veeramani (2010) and Sukanya Roy (2011).
