“The main thing I got from IITGN is lifelong friendships. I think everything else is secondary. It’s the friendships that we made that matter the most [to me].” Dr. Yogesh Goyal forged some of his closest friendships during his time at IITGN. He fondly recounts, “In our first year, we didn’t study that much. Before the exam, we would often split the syllabus between us and explain it to each other. It didn’t work perfectly every time [smiles], but, importantly, it brought us close together.” 

Yogesh graduated from IIT Gandhinagar with B.Tech. (Honors) in Chemical Engineering in 2012. He was awarded the Gold Medal for Outstanding Overall Academic Performance & Outstanding Research Award.

He describes how he came to enroll in IITGN, “My JEE rank was 3,908, and I was the last general category rank to be accepted. If my rank were any worse, I wouldn’t have gotten in.” But he believes that this experience had a profound effect on his life.

At the end of his first year, [late] Prof S L Narayanamurthy motivated me and helped facilitate a Summer Research Fellowship at IIT Bombay. This experience sparked his interest in the field. “I could change my branch easily as my GPA was excellent. But this research experience made me stay in chemical engineering. In hindsight, that was a pivotal decision.” 

The following summer, he chose to immerse himself in research rather than go home, this time as a Summer Research Fellow at Washington University. It was a phenomenal experience as he experimented and published papers on predicting the yield of baker’s yeast, nanoparticles responsible for the inactivation of bacterium, and more. “I learned that I enjoyed research an order of magnitude more than managing people in a non-scientific context. This was a big turning point.” He spent the next two years focusing on research. The only other passion he indulged in was basketball. He captained the institute’s basketball team in local and national tournaments. He also captained the Chemical Engineering basketball team and won three inter-department championships. With Prof Jaison as the sports contingent leader, Yogesh’s team lost a match against IIT Kanpur during their first Inter-IIT. However, Yogesh recalls that event as a major historical moment for IIT Gandhinagar basketball which went on to achieve great things in subsequent tournaments. Another incident from his college days that still cracks him up is a prank involving a stern hostel caretaker, where a student had parked the caretaker’s bike on the hostel roof. 

Yogesh believed that what IITGN lacked in infrastructure, it made up for by providing emotional and mental support. “Prof Sudhir Jain largely treated us as adults. A lot of policies introduced were bold and allowed us to make decisions. It gave us a lot of confidence.” This self-assurance helped him in applying to Princeton University, where he got selected for pursuing a Ph.D. in Chemical and Biological Engineering in 2012. 

“My experience at IITGN also taught me to fearlessly embrace uncertainties.” This ability to adapt helped him start his research group at Northwestern University, US. As an assistant professor, his lab is dedicated to studying single-cell biology of development and disease. Recently, he created a framework called FateMap, which combines single-cell RNA sequencing and DNA barcoding to reveal the fates of millions of cells subjected to anti-cancer therapy.