Erasmus School of Economics’ master student Kavin Varadharajulu has been awarded the REmagine Award for his master thesis, in the category Future Health and Healthcare. The REmagine Award is presented annually to Economics and Business students whose master’s theses show academic excellence and positive societal impact.
The positive impact of AI
The winning thesis, “Evaluating Pretrained LLMs as Scalable Diabetes Pre-Screening Tools on Self-Reported Health Data”, examines how AI can improve early diabetes detection. For his research, Varadharajulu compared traditional Random Forest models, which rely on predefined statistical patterns, with large language model (LLM) approaches. These LLMs can interpret structured health data more adaptively.
While Random Forests showed strong accuracy, LLMs especially when given multiple examples as input, also called few-shot prompting, achieved higher sensitivity. It could do this using only five adaptively selected questions, compared to the 20 questions typically required. This can reduce patient burden by up to 76%. The study concludes that LLM-powered, home-based risk assessments offer a scalable, equitable, and cost-efficient strategy for early diabetes detection.
REmagine: positive impact on the economy and society
The REmagine Award is presented annually to Economics and Business students whose master’s theses stand out for their academic excellence and positive impact on the economy and society. The award, initiated by the Decanenberaad Economie en Bedrijfskunde (DEB), encourages collaboration between faculties across different universities.
There are five award categories, with each winner receiving a specially designed crystal award and a cash prize of €5,000. From more than 100 entries, 15 finalists were selected to attend the DEB Impact Day on 2 December 2025. During this event, each finalist presented their research, after which the jury selected five winners, one for each category.
- More information
Download Kavin Varadharajulu's thesis above. Kavin Varadharajulu obtained his master Data Science and Marketing Analytics.
For more information, please contact Ronald de Groot, Media & Public Relations Officer at Erasmus School of Economics: rdegroot@ese.eur.nl, +316 53 641 846.
