Undergraduate Akshar Ramkumar Selected as 2026–27 Churchill Scholar

Fourth-year mathematics undergraduate Akshar Ramkumar has been selected as one of 16 recipients of the Churchill Scholarship, which provides funding for a one-year master's degree at the University of Cambridge.

At Caltech, Ramkumar has conducted research in quantum computation and its intersection with theoretical mathematics. The summer after his second year, he worked in the lab of John Preskill, the Richard P. Feynman Professor of Theoretical Physics and Allen V. C. Davis and Lenabelle Davis Leadership Chair of the Institute for Quantum Science and Technology, where he conducted theoretical research to establish bounds on the efficiency of then-novel quantum Gibbs sampling algorithms.

"Before Caltech, I had never been exposed to the exhilarating feeling of working on novel problems in research. I'm beginning to understand how invaluable a long-term research vision can be, to methodically deconstruct and tackle problems over the span of months or years," Ramkumar says. "I'm still growing as a researcher, but that is one central aspiration of mine."

This past summer, Ramkumar worked at MIT on a research project focused on characterizing the complexity of quantum error correction and exploring how it can be leveraged to build new cryptographic protocols. The paper that resulted from this work is one of two papers to which Ramkumar has contributed that will be presented at the 2026 Quantum Information Processing Conference.

At Cambridge, he plans to pursue a master's degree in advanced computer science and work on problems in quantum complexity theory or algorithms.

"I am honored to be part of the Churchill community, and I am particularly excited to meet the other scholars and make some new friends. The opportunity to live in a new country and research with dedicated students and professors is a gift," Ramkumar says.

Ramkumar is the 24th Caltech student to receive the award since the Churchill Scholarship was first awarded in 1963.