Harvey Mudd Junior Mithra Karamchedu Named 2025 Goldwater Scholar

Harvey Mudd College junior Mithra Karamchedu has been named a 2025 recipient of the prestigious Barry Goldwater Scholarship, the premier national award for undergraduate researchers in STEM fields.

Karamchedu, a computer science and mathematics major from Portland, Oregon, was selected from a national pool of over 5,000 college sophomores and juniors. This year, 1,350 students were nominated by 445 institutions; 441 scholars were selected. The scholarship provides up to $7,500 for tuition, fees, books and room and board.

Karamchedu joins 29 previous Harvey Mudd recipients of the scholarship since Congress established the award in 1986. At Mudd, students engage in high-level research alongside faculty, an environment that helped Karamchedu thrive.

Since his first year, Karamchedu has been involved in three main research projects which lie in the fields of theoretical computer science, combinatorics and graph theory. He is conducting research in graph algorithms with Professor Lucas Bang, in Ramsey theory with his brother Chaitanya Karamchedu ’21 (PhD student at the University of Maryland) and former HMC President Maria Klawe (now at Math for America) and in phase transitions through a Santa Fe Institute REU under Cristopher Moore and Gülce Kardeş. He is also working with HMC Professor Andrés Vindas Meléndez to continue his Ramsey theory research. Karamchedu looks forward to publishing papers on each of these projects.

An aspiring professor and researcher, Karamchedu tutors and grades in HMC’s computer science and mathematics departments and was recognized by the Mathematical Association of America for an essay on Claude Shannon.

After graduating, Karamchedu plans to pursue a PhD in theoretical computer science, with a particular emphasis on complexity theory and the design and analysis of algorithms. “Afterward, I hope to teach and do research in this field at the university level,” he says. “Each of my research experiences thus far has helped me develop and refine the research areas that I’d like to pursue as a career. Broadly speaking, I’m excited by problems that ask us to find a delicate algebraic/combinatorial structure hidden within a vast search space, and to either count or generate that structure. I’d love to continue working on these problems as a PhD student and in my career beyond.

“I feel deeply honored to receive the Goldwater Scholarship,” Karamchedu said. “Each of my mentors has been incredibly warm, patient and supportive—they’ve helped me grow as a researcher, and speaking to them always leaves me feeling more inspired!”