Karuna is a physician-scientist at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, New York, USA, where she is principal investigator in the Molecular Pharmacology Program at Sloan Kettering Institute, Attending Physician in the Gastrointestinal Oncology Service, Director of Metastasis Research in the Center for Colorectal Cancer and Associate Program Director of the Hematology/Oncology Fellowship Program. She received her undergraduate and MD/PhD degrees from the University of Cambridge/MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology, UK, trained in internal medicine at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center/Harvard Medical School and in medical oncology at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. The Ganesh laboratory seeks to define the molecular mechanisms that underpin the phenotypic plasticity of metastatic cancer, and the co-evolution of the tumour microenvironmental response to dynamically emerging tumour regenerative states.

Karuna employs highly interdisciplinary approaches spanning clinical biospecimen analysis, patient-derived organoid and mouse modeling, computational analysis and drug development to understand and target advanced cancer.