Kumar Thurimella, PhD

I am a final-year MD student at the University of Colorado School of Medicine and recently completed my PhD at the University of Cambridge. This summer, I will begin Internal Medicine residency at Stanford Health Care on the ABIM Research Pathway (Short Track), with a guaranteed Rheumatology fellowship at Stanford to follow. Before medical school, I worked as a software engineer at Uber, where I first saw the potential of computation to find precise signals within vast, complex systems. That conviction — that algorithms could help unravel the mechanisms behind autoimmune disease — led me to pursue a career as a physician-scientist.

My work sits at the intersection of AI, computational biology, and clinical medicine. I am drawn to rheumatology, where immune dysregulation, complex patient data, and computational modeling converge with the opportunity to develop targeted therapies for patients who need them most.

My PhD in Biotechnology and Statistics/Deep Learning focuses on using protein lanugage models to discover new microbial enzymes linked in immune mediated diseases. I was advised by Dr. Sergio Bacallado at Cambridge and Dr. Ramnik Xavier at the Broad Institute and Mass General Hospital.

My newest paper, Identifying microbial protease allergens through protein language model-guided homology, was just published in Cell Systems (2026). It introduces a deep learning framework using protein language models to uncover candidate allergenic serine proteases across gut and oral microbiome gene catalogs. The work was recently profiled by the Cambridge Department of Chemical Engineering and Biotechnology. Other recent work includes CAZyLingua, a protein language model-based tool for annotating carbohydrate-active enzymes in metagenomics (BMC Bioinformatics, 2025).

I am grateful to the Gates Cambridge Scholarship and Rotary International Scholarship for funding my PhD.

At the University of Colorado School of Medicine, I earned Honors in all six core clinical clerkships — Internal Medicine, OB/GYN, Pediatrics, Family Medicine, Psychiatry, and Surgery — as well as in my Rheumatology and Medicine Acting Internship rotations. I was elected to Alpha Omega Alpha (AOA), the national medical honor society.

I will continue my clinical training at Stanford Health Care, where I matched into Internal Medicine on the ABIM Research Pathway (Short Track), beginning June 2026. The pathway leads directly into a guaranteed Rheumatology fellowship at Stanford starting in 2028, allowing me to integrate rigorous clinical training with protected research time as I build a career as a physician-scientist focused on autoimmune disease.