Priyanshu Alluri ’26, a Presidential Scholar who is majoring in biology modified with computer science, has won a Churchill Scholarship, which funds a year of postgraduate study at the University of Cambridge. 

Scholars, who attend Churchill College at Cambridge, are selected on the basis of their academic and research achievements.

Alluri, who is also a Stamps Scholar and is minoring in chemistry, will do a research master’s in pathology, focusing on B cells, white blood cells that help defend the body against disease, including cancer.

Having served summer research internships working with patients at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis, the work “has a lot of emotional resonance,” he says.

“I know people this could impact, not now, but far down the line,” says Alluri, who is from Tennessee. “And it feels a lot more urgent in that way.”

The Churchill Scholarship was established at the request of Sir Winston Churchill as part of the founding of Churchill College, Cambridge, in order to deepen the partnership between the United States and United Kingdom and advance science and technology in both countries. It is administered by the Winston Churchill Foundation of the United States, which funds up to 18 scholarships per year in science, mathematics, engineering, and science policy. 

Christie Harner, associate dean of undergraduate education for fellowships and scholars programs, says she is thrilled that Alluri has received the prestigious award. 

“Priyanshu is an exceptional researcher, public servant, and student, and it has been a pleasure working with him as a Stamps Scholar and fellowship applicant,” Harner says. “His interdisciplinary projects, bridging computation and wet-lab biology, are evidence of Dartmouth’s deep and wide commitment to undergraduate research.”

At Dartmouth, Alluri has evolved, both personally and academically, in ways that surprised him.

He wanted to dance, and despite being “terrified,” joined Street Soul.

The members of the open dance team “taught me everything they knew,” says Alluri, who is now captain. “They made me much more confident as a dancer, much happier as a dancer. And then they became my community.”

The son of computer engineers, he had sworn “to never touch computer science.” Nonetheless, he took Introduction to Programming and Computation with Vasanta Lakshmi Kommineni, a senior lecturer of computer science. 

“She was absolutely incredible and super engaged and got me really into computer science,” he says. “I really saw what I could do, so I added it into my own research trajectory.”

Alluri built upon that foundation with help from Wesley Marrero, assistant professor of engineering, whom he met through the First Year Research in Engineering Experience.

“Professor Marrero took me in when I had no computational background,” Alluri says. “He has mentored me in a lot of my own computational work and helped me develop my own project and get that published.”

“That’s a lot of effort for an undergraduate he had never met before,” he adds.

Alluri is lead author on a Dartmouth study, Fairness-aware K-means clustering in digital mental health for higher education students: a generalizable framework for equitable clustering, published this month in JAMIA Open, a journal of the American Medical Informatics Association. 

The research is based on a project he completed, with Marrero’s guidance, as a Class of ’74 Health Equity Scholar that found mental illness is under- and misdiagnosed more frequently among minority groups than in majority populations, and outlined a strategy for reducing misdiagnoses, leading to better mental health outcomes for underserved populations. 

Marrero says that soon after meeting Alluri, he was struck by his “preemptive initiative.”

They had developed a research question, only to discover it had already been answered. But instead of asking, “Well, what do I do now?” Alluri took an active and proactive approach, quickly coming up with several potential topics. 

“That is something that is rare to see,” says Marrero, who also appreciates Alluri’s focus on real-world implications. “It’s math with a purpose, it’s use-inspired research, it’s research with the end in mind.”

Regarding the Churchill Scholarship, Marrero is “enormously proud” of Alluri.

“It’s amazing what he has been able to accomplish so far, and I’m truly excited about what comes with this award, the exposure he’s going to get at the University of Cambridge, and what I know he will be able to accomplish later on,” Marrero says.

Alluri has also worked closely with Soroush Vosoughi, an associate professor of computer science. Their current project, with Xiaofeng Wang, an associate professor of molecular and systems biology, is a deep learning model that can predict interactions between certain regulatory elements in DNA and the genes they regulate.

Having Vosoughi as a mentor has also been a tremendous experience, says Alluri, who counts his years at Dartmouth as his happiest yet. 

“I think a lot of it is because the mentorship is great and the opportunities I’ve gotten here are absolutely incredible,” says Alluri. “They’ve all been very adamant that I get my own project and that I develop the skills to push it forward on my own.”

In addition to the most recent publication, at St. Jude Alluri co-led a paper with Thirumala-Devi Kanneganti that identified a novel regulator of cell death implicated in certain cancers. Last year, he was awarded a Goldwater Scholarship and also won a Marshall Scholarship, which he declined with the hope that he would be awarded the Churchill Scholarship this year. 

Looking ahead, Alluri is excited to take a break this summer and then dive into researching B-cells at Cambridge.

“The earlier these cells get involved in cancer, the more likely the cancer is to be cleared. A big problem, though, is it’s really hard to tell when they’re getting involved because you don’t normally take samples of cancer until it’s very late in the cycle,” he says. “If we know better when these cells are getting involved in the cancer, when they’re coming in to fight, we can have better interventions.”

After that, “the dream” is to enter an MD/PhD program and eventually work as a physician-scientist, splitting his time between the clinic and lab.

“Research needs to have a clinical impact,” Alluri says. “Being a physician means that I can target the research I do to the patient population or the clinical problems that I see.”

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For information about applying for scholarship programs, visit the Fellowships Office.