Pragya Kumari

A vast range of compelling educational opportunities attracted Pragya Kumari to Arizona State University, along with its vibrant social and cultural environment.

She was particularly drawn to the array of opportunities offered by the computer science program to get professional experience outside of the classroom.

“It’s not just about software engineering and coding all the time. It can involve very theory heavy or involve very hands-on learning. It is what you make of it,” she says.

Outside of classroom instruction, Kurami participated the Engineering Projects In Community Service, or EPICS, a social entrepreneurship program partnering students with nonprofit organizations, schools and other organizations to design, construct and deploy technologies to address various community challenges.

Her EPICS endeavor involved working on a project called Hydration Station, helping to develop a device that cleaned and filled water bottles and on a Structured Query Language, or SQL, Database project in which she provided documentation and did research to help capture soil content from shrimp farming.

She was also involved in the Free-Air Carbon Dioxide Enrichment program, a global environmental research effort, supported primarily by the U.S. Department of Energy, that studies the long-term effects of elevated carbon dioxide levels on crops and ecosystems to examine how they will respond to climate change.

“It was very meaningful because I got job experience and had leadership roles,” Kumari says.

Among other edifying experiences was guiding a group of graduate students in their work to produce a research paper on lexical abilities of artificial intelligence, or AI.

“I analyzed 50 paragraphs that had possible misinterpretations made by AI, and explained how Large Language Models could misunderstand phrases or words with contextual meanings.

Kumari also participated in various leadership positions at ASU. She enrolled in the Fulton Accelerated Community Experience Program in her freshman year and became a peer leader in her sophomore year. She was a student counselor for the E2, the Fulton Schools’ introductory experience for first-year students. Recently, she also served as a Grand Challenges Scholar Program summer counselor for first-year students, introducing them to ASU and various engineering programs.

For her future endeavors, she is planning to pursue a master’s degree in data science, with a focus on computational mathematics. to work across various fields from machine learning theory, quantitative finance, and scientific computing. The degree provides the mathematical backbone of modern machine learning, simulation, and decision-making systems.

Favorites

Hobby: Reading
Bands/Performers: Mamamoo or The Neighbourhood
TV show: Better Call Saul
Movie: Fight Club/Gone Girl
Book: White Nights by Dostoyevsky

Read about other exceptional graduates of the Fulton Schools’ spring 2026 class.

Written by Joe Kullman