Vivaan Pradhan

Global Challenge: Expanding equitable access to education through technology and systems design. I am interested in how AI and infrastructure can be developed responsibly to widen opportunity while accounting for cultural and social contexts.

Vivaan Pradhan is a Computer Science major from the Pacific Northwest, having grown up in the Seattle area. He chose computer science because he is drawn to solving problems step by step through logic, structure, and creativity, and he sees technology as a way to build practical systems that can improve people’s lives. His background in Scouts has shaped many of his values, including community service, leadership, resilience, and a love for the outdoors. Through those experiences, he developed an appreciation for working with others, learning from different perspectives, and understanding how people approach challenges in different ways. Outside of academics, Vivaan enjoys skiing and ski instructing.

At NYU, Vivaan has participated in hackathons inside and outside the university, where he has worked on virtual reality projects involving telemetry pipelines, WebSockets, and real-time analytics for tracking user behavior and system performance in immersive environments. These projects have strengthened his experience with software architecture, networked communication, event-driven data flow, debugging interactive systems, and translating raw technical data into usable insights. Although he has not yet had a professional internship, he is actively working toward one while beginning to contribute to open-source development. In the short term, Vivaan hopes to gain internship or research experience that deepens his software engineering skills. In the long term, he hopes to design systems that expand access to education, opportunity, and meaningful participation in society.

Vivaan wanted to join the GLASS program because it connects engineering, global systems, and cultural context in a way that matches how he wants to approach problem-solving. He is especially interested in learning how technical solutions interact with social structures, institutions, and communities, rather than viewing engineering as something that exists in isolation. As a GLASS scholar, he is most looking forward to collaborating with peers from different backgrounds, studying global challenges through an interdisciplinary lens, and developing the humility and adaptability needed to design responsibly across cultures. The global issues he is most interested in are quality education, innovation and infrastructure, and reduced inequalities, particularly as they relate to access to learning and opportunity. These issues matter to him because his experiences with teaching, mentoring, and building educational technology have shown him that talent and effort are often not enough when systems are fragmented or unequal, and he hopes to contribute to solutions that make education and opportunity more accessible at scale.