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Oxford Bound: Four Indian American College Seniors Among 32 Rhodes Scholars 

Oxford Bound: Four Indian American College Seniors Among 32 Rhodes Scholars 

  • The U.S. scholars will join an international group of scholars chosen from more than 70 countries around the world and two global scholars from any country in the world without a scholarship.

Four Indian Americans are among 32 Rhodes Scholars who will commence their graduate studies at Oxford in October next year across the breadth of the social sciences, humanities, and biological and physical sciences. They were selected from a pool of 865 applicants who were nominated by their colleges and universities. The U.S. scholars will join an international group of scholars chosen from more than 70 countries around the world and two global scholars from any country in the world without a scholarship. 

Dr. Ramona L. Doyle, American Secretary of the Rhodes Trust, called the Rhodes Scholarships, “the oldest and best-known award for international study, and arguably the most famous academic award available to American college graduates.” They were created in 1902 by the Will of Cecil Rhodes and are provided in partnership with the Second Century Founders, John McCall MacBain O.C. and The Atlantic Philanthropies, and other benefactors.

Following are the Indian American scholars selected this year: 

Aneesh C. Muppidi of Schenectady, New York, is a senior at Harvard University where he majors in Computer Science and Neuroscience. He has conducted research at Harvard’s Computational Robotics Lab, Computational Cognitive Neuroscience Lab, and MIT’s Fiete Lab. His scholarship also informs his work on AI policy at the OSTP at the White House. He served as the president of the Harvard Computational Neuroscience Undergraduate Society, co-president of the Hindu Students Association, and president of the Harvard Spikeball Club. At Oxford, he will pursue an M.Sc. in Advanced Computer Science and a Master’s in Public Policy.

Om H. Gandhi of South Barrington, Illinois, will pursue a D.Phil. in Oncology at Oxford. He is a senior at the University of Pennsylvania where he is completing a B.A. in Neuroscience and Public Health as well as an M.S. in Bioengineering. His research focuses on novel cancer immunotherapies, and he has completed research experiences at the Children’s Hospital of Pennsylvania Center for Childhood Cancer Research and Penn Medicine. He does extensive volunteer work with individuals with substance use disorder. He is also a student leader of the Wharton Undergraduate Healthcare Club and the Penn Hindu-Jain Association. As editor-in-chief of the Penn Healthcare Review, he oversaw a major expansion of the journal’s application pool and editorial staff. 

Anushka Nair of Lake Oswego, Oregon, is a senior at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where she is simultaneously completing bachelor’s and master’s degrees in Computer Science and Engineering. Her research focuses on the intersection of artificial intelligence and ethics, and her graduate thesis examines how large language models can be used to identify harmful misinformation that is less easily identifiable by human fact-checkers or other automated systems. She has completed internships at Tesla, Oracle, and the United Nations. Nair is a classical violinist and an amateur filmmaker. At Oxford, she will pursue a D.Phil. in Social Data Science.

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Ayush Noori of Bellevue, Washington, is a senior at Harvard University, where he is studying for A.B. and M.Sc. degrees in computer science and neuroscience. His research uses artificial intelligence to learn from large-scale biomedical data to identify diagnosis and treatment options, and he has developed an AI model that can be deployed to predict treatment outcomes in bipolar disorder, Parkinson’s disease and neuropathic conditions. He has co-authored over 20 peer-reviewed papers in top journals and was awarded the prestigious Barry Goldwater Scholarship for natural sciences.  He is the co-founder and co-president of Harvard Undergraduate OpenBio Laboratory, where he manages a team of 36 students and has raised over $60,000 to support undergraduate biology research projects and a free summer research program for high school students with backgrounds underrepresented in science. He hopes to complete an M.Sc.(R) in Clinical Neurosciences and an M.Sc.(R) in Physiology, Anatomy and Genetics.

(Top photo: Anushka Nair of Lake Oswego, Oregon, a senior at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology).

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