Ananya Premkumar remembers it clearly.
It was Thanksgiving break last year, and the then-senior at Midlothian High School was meeting her old calculus study group for lunch. The rest of the group had graduated from Midlothian a few months before, going their separate ways to college. That included Mukhammad Aziz Umurzokov, then a freshman at Brown University.
The foursome hadn’t seen each other since graduation, so they caught up over lunch.
“And then we promise each other we’re going to do the same thing during winter break,” said Premkumar, a first-year biomedical engineering student at the University of Virginia. “We should totally meet up again.”
But the next time was at Umurzokov’s grave.
Left: Premkumar, left, and Umurzokov, right, pose with their Midlothian High School calculus group in May 2025. Right: Premkumar celebrates her high school graduation. (Contributed photos)
Umurzokov and his fellow student, Ella Cook, died Dec. 13 in a mass shooting on Brown University’s campus in Providence, Rhode Island. Nine other students were wounded.
Premkumar texted Umurzokov’s phone that night, before the victims’ identities reached national news. She tried again in the morning, hoping for a response that never came.
The following evening, Instagram posts mourning Umurzokov began to roll in. A GoFundMe in his honor, set up by his sister, confirmed the worst.
“That was just the moment where I started bawling my eyes out,” Premkumar said. “I truly did think that he was going to be OK. It just really didn’t feel real.”
For Premkumar, the loss came amid her college application process, which Umurzokov was supporting. Since her junior year, when the two grew close in an advanced calculus class, he’d offered SAT and application advice that continued through his time at Brown.
As Premkumar’s acceptance letters came in, she wished she could talk to Umurzokov. “He passed away before I even got my offers,” she wrote in a LinkedIn post this summer. “When he was here, I shared my (early decisions and early action) rejections with him, but he would cheer me on.”
In Umurzokov’s honor, she added a new criterion to her decision-making process.
“It will probably haunt me for the rest of my life that I’m living and he’s not,” Premkumar said. “That’s why I wanted to find an educational institution where I can actually do the things that I want to do and make him proud.”
Premkumar puts the finishing touches on her first-year dorm room. She started classes in UVA’s School of Engineering & Applied Science this week. (Photo by Matt Riley, University Communications)
She believes she found that at the University of Virginia. Premkumar cited UVA’s culture and historical value, as well as the “abstract and interdisciplinary nature” of the School of Engineering and Applied Science’s curriculum, which allows students to explore a variety of interests, as factors in her decision.
And Premkumar has interests. She served on the Chesterfield Youth Advisory Board for two years in high school, sponsoring mental health workshops for middle schoolers to reduce youth violence in the county. She balanced that with a varsity tennis schedule, math tutoring sessions and founding Midlothian’s AI Club.
This summer, she’s been splitting her time between building a machine-learning model to predict Alzheimer’s risk and teaching kids programming and game development.
