Four Indian Americans chosen as Rhodes Scholars for 2025

Aneesh Muppidi, Om Gandhi, Anushka Nair and Ayush Noori will join scholars from more than 70 countries at Oxford

By Arun Kumar

Four Indian Americans — Aneesh C. Muppidi, Om H. Gandhi, Anushka Nair and Ayush Noori — are among 32 Americans chosen as Rhodes Scholars for 2025. They will join an international group of Scholars from more than 70 countries going to Oxford University in England in October 2025 to pursue graduate studies.

Rhodes Scholarships provide all expenses for two or three years of study at the University of Oxford (ranked the #1 university in the world in some global rankings) and may allow funding in some instances for four years.

READ: Inaugural Indian Community Endowed Chair installed at UCF (November 15th, 2024)

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.”

The Scholarships 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 many other generous benefactors.

Indian American scholars are:

Aneesh C. Muppidi from 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.

Muppidi’s scholarship also informs his work on Al policy at the OSTP at the White House. Aneesh 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 MSc in Advanced Computer Science and a Master’s in Public Policy.

Om H. Gandhi from South Barrington, Illinois, is a senior at the University of Pennsylvania where he is completing a BA in Neuroscience and Public Health as well as an MS 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.

Om 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, Gandhi oversaw a major expansion of the journal’s application pool and editorial staff. At Oxford, Om will pursue a DPhil in Oncology.

Anushka Nair from 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 DPhil in Social Data Science.

Ayush Noori from Bellevue, Washington, is a senior at Harvard University, where he is studying for AB and MSc 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 Al model that can be deployed to predict treatment outcomes in bipolar disorder, Parkinson’s disease and neuropathic conditions.

He has coauthored over 20 peer-reviewed papers in top journals and was awarded the prestigious Barry Goldwater Scholarship for natural sciences.

Noori 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 support a free summer research program for high school students with backgrounds underrepresented in science.

He hopes to complete an MSc (R) in Clinical Neurosciences and an MSc (R) in Physiology, Anatomy and Genetics.