Scholar-Elect Pranav Ganta aims to contribute to developing strong international frameworks for cyberbiosecurity as part of his MPhil course in Global Risk and Resilience
We talk a lot about innovation, but what we really need are systems that can adapt, absorb and imagine futures beyond the crises we’re already living through.
Pranav Ganta
Pranav Ganta’s work is focused on understanding and managing risk – not just within one discipline, but across the many interconnected systems that shape our world.
At Cambridge he will pursue an MPhil in Global Risk and Resilience at the University of Cambridge, with a focus on how different political, legal and scientific systems shape global approaches to risk. The course, the first of its kind at the university, aims to build anticipatory systems of regulation that can protect critical biological data and infrastructure from escalating global threats.
The course will build on Pranav’s longstanding interest in the structures – social, political and regulatory- that determine vulnerability.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, he watched as both his hometown of Midland-Odessa, Texas, and his family’s hometown of Hyderabad, South India, were overwhelmed in very different ways. “It was the same virus, but two very different experiences,” he says. “That cemented this idea that risk isn’t just about the hazard itself. It’s about the structures around us – social, legal and political – that determine who is protected and who is left behind.”
At Cambridge, Pranav will study cyberbiosecurity, an emerging field concerned with protecting the intersection of biological data, digital infrastructure and public health systems. His research will examine how private and governmental sector actors are navigating a fragmented international regulatory landscape while managing a broad range of cyberbiosecurity risks.
These include safeguarding patient data privacy from unauthorised access, securing public health databases and outbreak surveillance systems from manipulation, ensuring the integrity of diagnostic test data and protecting public biological databases from malicious interference. He says that, as many labs adopt automated systems powered by artificial intelligence and robotics, vulnerabilities in laboratory cybersecurity also present growing concerns.
Pranav [2025] aims to contribute to the development of stronger, more coherent international frameworks for cyberbiosecurity.
Early years
Pranav’s parents are both physicians who immigrated to the US from India. He says they showed him the importance of advocacy. “That’s why I think I became interested in the legal and policy dimensions of medical treatment— we have to advocate at both the individual and systemic levels. At the moment, dialogue between the two is missing,” he states.
Growing up in a diverse community, Pranav found himself exposed to many perspectives. In high school, he joined the debate team, where he honed his public speaking and policy analysis skills, competing at both regional and national levels on issues ranging from criminal justice reform to international arms sales.
He also explored photography and visual storytelling, finding creative ways to bridge the worlds of science, art and policy, displaying his work at several exhibitions about themes such as sustainability, disease and cultural preservation. Alongside these interests, he worked on medical research projects, investigating protein misfolding in Alzheimer’s disease and developing improved diagnostic models for gestational diabetes and chronic kidney disease.
At the same time, he became acutely aware of how debate, science and art were often treated as separate, even incompatible, practices to science. “They were siloed – treated as different conversations, different languages,” he says. From early on, he hoped to find ways to bring those worlds into conversation with one another, believing that understanding complex problems requires multiple ways of knowing and seeing.
Harvard
At Harvard, Pranav’s academic path was intentionally interdisciplinary. He began with a focus on Neuroscience, saying he was drawn to the way it tells stories about behaviour and memory. But he later added a concurrent master’s in Chemical Biology after becoming captivated by the science of pharmaceutical development and the policy that governs it.
For his senior thesis, he worked with researchers at the Massachusetts General Hospital Brain Tumor Center to engineer and evaluate a novel cancer immunotherapy using a genetically modified herpes simplex virus to target glioblastoma. The project brought together molecular virology and treatment design, but also raised deeper regulatory and ethical questions. “I found myself wondering not just whether a therapy worked, but how access to it would be shaped by policy and regulation,” says Pranav.
That curiosity led him to conduct policy research across academic, government and international settings. For the Congressional Neuroscience Caucus in Washington DC, he developed neuroethical frameworks for the governance of advanced brain-machine interfaces, technologies that push the boundaries of both neuroscience and privacy law. At Pfizer, he worked closely with internal policy teams and the Food and Drug Administration to analyse regulatory bottlenecks for machine learning-equipped medical devices, helping draft indicators that could ease the compliance process without compromising safety. Through the Harvard Kennedy School, he became involved in efforts to prepare for the upcoming reauthorisation of the Prescription Drug User Fee Act (PDUFA) and the Medical Device User Fee Amendments (MDUFA), helping shape discussions around the future of innovation and equity in drug and device approval.
Internationally, Pranav has worked on health legislation and regulatory reform in multiple parliamentary systems, including Japan and New Zealand, contributing to cross-border efforts to shape responsible innovation in biotechnology and public health. These experiences deepened his understanding of how laws are made, revised and implemented in a variety of cultural and political contexts, especially when it comes to emerging technologies like AI-enabled diagnostics and global health equity initiatives.
Pranav says his commitment to policy is grounded in public service. With the support of the Harvard Presidential Public Service Fellowship, he worked with Lumiere Health International, a global health solutions firm, to create stronger partnerships between medical institutions and legal aid networks, aiming to ensure that asylum seekers and displaced individuals receive continuous care and protection.
Together, these experiences have shaped his belief that science and policy must evolve in tandem, especially in a world where innovation often moves faster than regulation, and that systems need to be not only technically advanced, but also ethically grounded and globally inclusive.
Cambridge
Pranav is drawn to systems that don’t fit neatly into disciplinary boxes. He sees technologies like AI and synthetic biology not as isolated tools, but as actors within broader social, economic and environmental ecosystems. That’s why the structure of the Global Risk and Resilience programme at Cambridge – and the work of the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk – resonated so strongly with him. “It’s rare to find a place where all of those conversations are happening under one roof,” he says. “This programme doesn’t just prepare you to respond to crisis – it prepares you to anticipate it.”
He says he is particularly interested in the “cell to society” approach that the programme encourages, a framework that traces how microscopic biological changes can scale up to affect social systems and vice versa. Whether working on AI regulation in Japan, oncolytic viruses in Boston or public health access in refugee clinics, Pranav has consistently sought to integrate these layers. “We talk a lot about innovation,” he says, “but what we really need are systems that can adapt, absorb and imagine futures beyond the crises we’re already living through.”
At Cambridge, Pranav hopes to contribute to those systems – not just by analysing risk, but by helping build tools to address their complexity.
