4 Indian-American grads win 2026 Harvard Hoopes Prize

Named after 1919 Harvard student Thomas T. Hoopes, the annual award recognizes outstanding scholarly work or research.

(from left) Gauri A. Sood and Sandhya Kumar / Harvard University

Harvard University has announced the 2026 class of winners of the annual Thomas Temple Hoopes Prize, featuring five Indian-American graduate students.

Led by the University's Faculty of Arts and Sciences the awards are given for excellence in undergraduate work and in teaching. The Indian-American who made it to this year's list will each be awarded a $5,000 cash prize to promote their excellence in their respective fields.

Psychology and Government student Gauri A. Sood was recognized for her submission entitled "Who Is Human? Biases in Frontier Image Generation Models."

Minnesota native Sood was supervised and nominated by Professor Mahzarin Banaji and Dr. Lindsey Davis.

Also on the list is Indian-American Sandhya Kumar who was awarded for her submission entitled "Enteric Neurons Rapidly Prime Systemic Immunity in Response to Mucosal Infection".

A junior at Harvard, Kumar is a 2022 U.S. Presidential Scholar. Tallahassee, Florida, resident Kumar is a junior at Harvard University. She was supervised and nominated by Dr. Ruaidhri Jackson.

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Another 2022 U.S. Presidential Scholar, Ashini Modi, was recognized for her submission entitled "Finding the Right Match Fast: Factors Influencing the SpeedStringency-Stability Tradeoff in RecA-Mediated Homology Recognition During Double Strand Break Repair".

Hailing from Shreveport, Louisiana, she was supervised and nominated by Professor Mara Prentiss.

Arundhati Oommen was awarded the Hoopes Prize for her submission entitled "When Luck Becomes the Arbiter: Responsibility, Risk, and the Limits of Outcome-Based Judgment".

Her work was supervised and nominated by Professor Edward Hall and Professor Xiao-Li Meng.

Named after 1919 Harvard student Thomas T. Hoopes, the annual award is funded by grants from Hoopes' estate. It recognizes outstanding scholarly work or research.

The University noted that the fund provides undergraduate prizes to be given for the purpose of "promoting, improving, and enhancing the quality of education . . . in literary, artistic, musical, scientific, historical, or other academic subjects made part of the College curriculum under faculty supervision and instruction."

The university highlighted that the awards recognize, promote, honor, and reward excellence in the work of undergraduates and their capabilities and skills in any subject, projects of research in science or the humanities, or in specific written work of the students under the instruction or supervision of the faculty.

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