Class of 2026 senior spotlight
For Arman Luthra ’26, the liberal arts experience at Wabash has not just been about exploring a variety of subjects but finding the connections between them. From the northernmost tip of India in Jammu and Kashmir to Crawfordsville, Luthra has spent these fleeting years seeking to bridge the gap between complex, high-level data and the real-world human impacts they create.
An international student, Luthra dove headfirst into Wabash trying to make an impact in the community regardless of his distance from home. As a freshman he served as a cartoonist for The Bachelor and a member of the Glee Club. From there, he went on to become the president of the Crawfordsville to Campus Committee. Economic research, however, was how Luthra first turned his talent for working with numbers into a story about the world.
During the summer of his freshman year, Luthra conducted research in Canada through the College on remittance models. Remittance is the transfer of money by a worker from outside of their country of origin back home, whether that be to their family or elsewhere. It is possible the sum of all such payments surpass international aid for developing countries, making it a critical area of research and modeling.
He developed a method to predict these financial flows with a 97% accuracy. His work was utilized by the government of India to help forecast and allocate its multi-billion dollar remittance budget. In that way, Luthra was able to turn statistics into a path for improving lives. In most of what Luthra does as a Little Giant, his passion lies with the deliberating and deciphering of small and large-scale problems. That mindset also allowed him to reach President Pro Tempore of the Student Senate.
Luthra’s most significant academic contribution lies in his senior capstone research. His work centered on deciphering the black box of algorithms within artificial intelligence. His research, alongside Isaac Grannis ’26 and BKT Assistant Professor of Computer Science Qixin Deng, explored how biases embedded in training data can lead to discriminatory outcomes.
“The direction we’re heading into as a world is one with artificial intelligence being ubiquitous,” said Luthra. “So I think understanding it is definitely helpful. With human discrimination, you can find the person involved in doing it. You don’t have that with AI.”
“Arman is one of the most impressive students I have worked with at Wabash,” said Deng. “He is exceptionally bright, highly responsible and able to turn ambitious ideas into polished results. In his senior capstone work on Prism, he helped develop a frontend system for exploring neural language model interpretability, and what stood out to me was not only the technical sophistication of the project, but also his ability to make complex ideas accessible through strong design, clear organization and thoughtful implementation.”
Luthra isn’t defined solely by his research and computer science skills — impressive, though, they are. He is deeply rooted in the creative and social life of the college. He is a painter, a guitarist and an avid soccer player who has served as the president of the Indoor Soccer Club.
In his capacity as an artist he made cartoons for The Bachelor; one particular piece regarding the Qatar World Cup garnered attention abroad. His depiction of the dire working conditions of South Asian immigrant laborers being imported to construct infrastructure for the event was so significant that a publishing company in Ireland reached out to feature his work in a textbook. For this feat and other great efforts, he was awarded the Patterson Goldberg Freshman Journalism Award.
Luthra’s advice to students is to get out there and talk to the people around you. As Luthra prepares to graduate, he plans on pursuing public policy work in San Francisco. It’s an open question how and where his skillset will help with statecraft in California, but he’s already served the most populous country in the world. Surely he can improve one mere city.