Two Duke undergraduates were named Barry M. Goldwater Scholars, one of the United States’ most prestigious undergraduate scholarships in the natural sciences, mathematics and engineering.
Junior Deven Gupta and sophomore Paul Rosu were selected out of a pool of over 1,350 applicants and are joined by 439 other recipients from colleges and universities across the United States. Goldwater Scholars receive up to $7,500 in funding per academic year to cover tuition, fees and books, as well as room and board.
The Barry Goldwater Scholarship and Excellence in Education Foundation was created by Congress in 1986 to honor the late Sen. Barry Goldwater. Since 1989, the scholarship has been awarded to college sophomores and juniors who have conducted meaningful research in the natural sciences, engineering and mathematics and are planning to pursue careers in those fields.
Gupta, an Irvine, California, native double majoring in biophysics and classical civilizations and pursuing a health policy certificate, conducts research alongside Professor of Biomedical Engineering Adam Wax that aims to influence the development of biomedical optical imaging. Specifically, Gupta works on multimodal applications of digital holography, including a device to simulate glaucoma in the lab.
He also worked at the biotech company Illumina and with the Duke Science & Society program on the development of patient genomic data principles with the goal of allowing patients to confidently access health data.
Gupta expressed his excitement to continue “advancing biomedical imaging to better understand disease mechanisms and improve diagnostic technologies,” as he looks toward specializing in biomedical optics throughout his career.
Rosu, a Chapel Hill native majoring in mathematics and computer science, researches machine learning and mathematical modeling with a focus on theoretical aspects of deep learning. His most recent work pertains to investigating diffusion transformer models to demonstrate how neural networks can learn complex patterns over manifolds.
Throughout his time at Duke, Rosu has conducted research with Professor of Mathematics Mark Haskins on geometric partial differential equations; Xiang Cheng, visiting assistant professor in the department of electrical and computer engineering, on transformer architecture; and Bhuwan Dhingra, assistant professor of computer science, on improvements to the reasoning capabilities of large language models.
Rosu also authored a paper titled “LITERA: An LLM-Based Approach to Latin-to-English Translation,” which examines the software’s role in “groundbreaking framework leveraging large language models to tackle the immense challenges of Latin translation.” His work was accepted to the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL) Findings 2025, which focuses on research and practice of computational linguistics in the Americas.
Rosu plans to pursue a graduate degree to continue his research at the intersection of deep learning, geometry and mathematics. Ultimately, he hopes to gain a deeper theoretical understanding of artificial intelligence models while creating methods that can solve challenging real-world problems.
Duke has produced a total of 99 Goldwater Scholars since the award’s inception in 1989. The 2024 winners were then-sophomore Ayush Jain, as well as then-juniors Juliet Jiang, Michelle Si and Marie-Hélène Tomé.
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Ava Littman is a Trinity sophomore and an associate news editor for the news department.