Priyanshi Vyas

Thanks to her father’s career in tech, Priyanshi Vyas grew up on three continents, living in India, Ireland, Canada and all over the United States. In high school in Texas, she suspected that focusing on technology would allow her to have an interesting career no matter where in the world she found herself living, but there was a problem. “I couldn’t see myself sitting and writing code,” she says.

Her father suggested cybersecurity. The idea resonated because Barry Allen, an identity of the superhero The Flash, works as a crime scene forensics investigator in that long-running television show, which is one of Vyas’s favorites. Forensic cybersecurity seemed like a perfect fit for her goals.

Vyas came to UMass Lowell for its cybersecurity program. As a first-year student, she got involved in the campus Cyber Security Club. As a sophomore, she began undergraduate research with Miner School of Computer and Information Sciences Associate Professor Sashank Narain, working on a visualization that helps debug cryptographic algorithms, which are algorithms that encode data and are famously difficult to check.

Narain told her she would be a good fit for UML’s Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition (CCDC) team, where he is a coach and advisor. She went to her first team meeting with two friends, and the three of them began attending Saturday information sessions led by team coach and former team captain Christopher Morales ’21, ’22, ’25. “I learned so much,” Vyas says. 

The team won the Northeast Cyber Defense League competition last year and went on to compete nationally, finishing in the top 10. For Vyas, however, the most significant victory was making the team. “There was a whole process,” she says. “You had to prove you could put in the work.” When she learned she was on the team, she says, “I was so happy.” 

Being the only woman in the room in these cybersecurity spaces was daunting at first, but she’s glad that she stuck it out. Last year’s lessons of support, friendship and representation on the CCDC team have inspired her. 

Vyas found help wherever she looked for it. “If you ask someone in another department a cybersecurity question, they may not always have the answer, but they’ll point you in the right direction,” she says. She advises new students not to hesitate to ask for that help.

To inspire other women to pursue careers in cybersecurity and support their activities on campus, Vyas is working to establish the Women in Cybersecurity (WiCys) Club. She’s devoting time to the club’s success, encouraging women to join in the spring ’27 semester, and sees it as a big part of what she hopes to accomplish in her time at UML.

She has returned to the CCDC team in her junior year with new confidence. “I’m more comfortable, and I can teach other people,” she says. She’s also encouraging women she meets at UML who are interested in cybersecurity to join the team.

This is the trajectory Vyas has in mind for her career as well. She can see a future for herself at a company that is testing for vulnerabilities in AI models, but she wants to do more. “Right now, my goal is to get more women into cybersecurity at my college,” Vyas says. “In the future, it may be in industry, somewhere else, or even coming back to UMass Lowell. I want to make sure whatever I do benefits the community around me.”