[July 10, 2024] Yogesh named a CZ Biohub Investigator: Yogesh was selected as a Chan Zuckerberg Biohub Chicago Investigator. The funding will enable the lab to venture into new high-risk areas, including collaborations with other CZI investigators, particularly Avinash Kalsotra from UIUC on liver regeneration.

[June 30, 2024] Several new additions to the lab: We welcome several new members this spring/summer, including Nitu Kumari (Postdoc), Nate Campbell (Postdoc), Pornchanan Pholraksa (Masters thesis), and Ida Buschel (Visiting Scholar from TUM). The lab will also host a few summer undergraduate students — Linda Wang (NSF REU Scholar), Rohan Sohini (DeFoe Fellow), Ryan Bui (Posse Scholar).

[June 18, 2024] Madeline named Ryan Fellow: Madeline Melzer, a PhD student in the lab, was awarded Ryan Fellowship! Ryan Fellowship is highly competitive and is one of the most prestigious fellowships at Northwestern. It is awarded to students in their 3rd year of PhD who have demonstrated exceptional talent and promise for research.

[June 18, 2024] Yogesh named Pew Scholar: Yogesh was selected as a Pew-Stewart Scholar for Cancer Research! Grateful for my past and current mentors for their support.

[June 18, 2024] Invited Talk at Ewha Womens University: Yogesh presented the lab’s latest work on cancer plasticity at Ewha Womans University in Seoul, South Korea! Enjoyed meeting the students as well. Thanks Kihyun Lee for generously hosting me!

[June 17, 2024] Invited Talk at KAIST: Yogesh presented the lab’s latest work on cancer plasticity at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science & Technology (KAIST) in Daejeon, South Korea! The highlight was meeting super motivated students. Thanks Yoosik Kim for hosting me!

[May 16, 2024] Invited Talk at Helmholtz Institute in Munich: Yogesh presented the lab’s latest work on cancer plasticity at the Computational Health Center at Helmholz Institute in Munich, Germany. Thanks Carsten Marr for hosting me!

[May 12-15, 2024] Invited Talk at Forbeck Forum: Yogesh presented the lab’s latest work on cancer plasticity at the Non-Genetic Drug Tolerance Mechanisms Forbeck Forum in Castello, Italy. Also got a chance to meet one of my former students, Lea Schuh, who is postdoc-ing in Italy!

[April 04, 2024] Invited Talk at NSF-Simons Annual Meeting: Yogesh presetned the lab’s latest work at the annual meeting of NSF-Simons Math-Bio institute in the Flatiron Institute in NYC! Also enjoyed meeting several other Q-bio folks.

[April 03, 2024] Invited Talk at NYU: Yogesh gave a chalk talk as a part of the night science forum at NYU, kindly hosted by the amazing Itai Yanai. Lots of discussions and interruptions. Quite an innovative format. Pictured is a VERY transformed LGA airport since Yogesh last visited!

[March 11, 2024] Invited Talk at MATHONCO 2024: Yogesh gave a talk at MATHONCO Theoretical approaches in cancer progression and treatment conference organized by Helen Byrne (Oxford University), Shaon Chakrabarti (NCBS), Mohit Jolly (IISc) and Franziska Michor (Harvard University) at the International Centre for Theoretical Sciences, Bangalore.

[March 4-10, 2024] Simons Visitor: Yogesh spent a week as a Simons Visitor at the Simons Centre for the Study of Living Machines, Bangalore. Yogesh was hosted by Shaon Chakrabarti and Archishman Raju at NCBS. This picture on the left is a plant is called Heliconia rostrata or Hanging Lobster Claw which enamored Yogesh for much of his stay :). Madeline Melzer, a 2nd year PhD student in the group, also joined for part of the trip.

[November 12, 2023] Talk at Dartmouth: Yogesh gave an invited seminar at Dartmouth University in their Discovery Science Seminar Series on our single cell cancer plasticity work. Thanks to Jose M. Delgado for the student-nominated invitation!

[November 05, 2023] Talk at University of Warsaw: Yogesh gave an invited seminar at the University of Warsaw in their Computational Medicine Seminar Series on our single cell theory work. Thanks to Ewa Szczurek for the invite!

[August 15, 2023] PhD student Emmie Grody wins award! Emmie Grody, a 3rd year PhD student in the lab won the best poster award at the CDB retreat! Madeline Melzer, a 2nd year PhD student, gave a talk, and Subia Ahmed, a Research Tech, presented a poster as well!

[August 15, 2023] New preprint from the lab! We provide an integrative computational and theoretical framework for inference of transcriptional adaptation genome-wide and exploration of its consequences in mammalian context. Congratulations Ian Mellis, Nico Bokdin and Madeline Melzer!

[August 07, 2023] New preprint from the lab! We develop and apply our novel framework, singletCode, to evaluate doublet detection algorithms on barcoded datasets with "ground truth" doublets. These algorithms prove inadequate, leading us to suggest singletCode as an alternative method for doublet detection. Congratulations Charles Zhang, Madeline Melzer, and Karun Kiani!

[July 19, 2023] New Paper out: Our updated work on FateMap was published in Nature. We show that diverse resistant fates can arise from homogeneous cells upon drug exposure and how the fates over weeks/months in drug are decided even before drug addition. The news was covered by: STAT News, Northwestern, and Schmidt Fellows.

[July 17, 2023] Yogesh gives a talk at SMB 2023 in Columbus Ohio: Yogesh gives an invited talk at the Society for Mathematical Biology Annual Meeting at The Ohio State University on single cell cancer plasticity.

[June 20, 2023] PhD student Madeline Melzer joins the lab: Madeline Melzer — a PhD student in the Driskill Graduate Program (DGP) — joins the Goyal and Arispe labs as a co-mentored student studying quantitative developmental biology. We welcome Madeline to the Goyal lab!

[June 12, 2023] Summer Undergraduate Students: The lab will host a few summer undergraduate students, all of whom won competitive awards for their summer internships. The students include: Rohan Sohini (McCormick SURA), Sofia White (), Naima Akter (SROP & EFRI), and Abdurrahman Waajid (SynBREU).

[May 20, 2023] Emilia Hojel offered an accelerated BS/MS degree: Emilia Hojel, a (then) undergraduate student, was offered an accelerated, thesis-based program for “outstanding undergraduates who have established research relationships with BME faculty members”. Emilia has accepted this offer and she will perform her BS/MS thesis work in the Goyal Laboratory. Congratulations Emilia!

[May 12, 2023] Tito passes his masters thesis candidacy exam: Tito passed his master thesis candidacy exam. His proposal was about cell fate decisions during early stages of embryonic development. His committee members are Yogesh, Dr. Mazhar Adli and Dr. Sadie Wignall. Congratulations Tito!

[May 9, 2023] Emmie passes her PhD thesis candidacy exam: : Emmie passed her PhD thesis candidacy exam. Her committee members are Erica Davis (chair), Navdeep Chandel, Judd Hultquist and Joshua Leonard. Congratulations Emmie!

[April 19, 2023] Yogesh gives a talk on melanoma drug resistance in Dermatology: Yogesh was invited to deliver one of the 2023 Joan and William Caro Lectureship in Dermatopathology at Northwestern University. Lots of exciting discussions and a preview into how clinicians and residents think about this major therapeutic problem. Thanks Amy Paller and Bethany E. Perez White for the invitation!

[April 17, 2023] Yogesh presents the rare-cell plasticity work at Johns Hopkins: Yogesh was invited to deliver the departmental seminar at Johns Hopkins Biochemistry and Molecular Biology Department. Lots of exciting discussions, meeting old friends and making new ones. Thanks Vito Rebecca for being a wonderful host!

[April 05, 2023] Jonas Braun joining Princeton for his PhD: Jonas Braun, the lab’s first trainee, accepted an offer from the Quantitative and Computational Biology Graduate Program at Princeton University. Jonas will be spending his graduate time in the exact same building as Yogesh did a few years back!

[March 15, 2023] Yogesh awarded Young Investigator Award for cancer research: Yogesh was awarded the 2023 Cancer Research Foundation Young Investigator Award for the lab’s work on plasticity and therapy resistance in cancer. Link to the announcement.

[February 28, 2023] Northwestern’s First Green Labs Certified Lab: Thanks to Emmie and Subia’s initiative and effort the Goyal Lab completed the SustainNU Green Lab Certification process, further committing the lab to sustainable practices and becoming the first lab at northwestern to receive this certification! Learn more about it!

[February 27, 2023] Yogesh gives an invited talk in Telluride: Yogesh gave an invitied talk at Physical Genomics and Transcriptional Engineering Conference in snowy Telluride, Colorado on the lab’s work on rare cell plasticity. Lot of exciting discussions with all attendees and skiing.

[January 3, 2023] Masters student Tito Chai joins the lab: Tito Chai — a  Masters Thesis student in the Masters of Reproductive Science and Medicine (MS-RSM) programme — joins the Goyal . We welcome Tito to the Goyal lab!

[November 22, 2022] Sharon Choi wins an academic year grant from Northwestern: Sharon Choi, an undergraduate student in the lab, was awarded a competitive submission grant of $1,000 by Northwestern University Office of Undergraduate Research Academic Year Undergraduate Research Grant.

[October 05, 2022] Julia Jiminez wins a travel award: Julia Jiminez, a summer SynBio REU student in the lab, received a Annual Biomedical Research Conference for Minoritized Scientists (ABRCMS) Student Travel Award to attend and present her work she did in our lab at the ABRCMS conference in California! Congratulations Julia!

[September 21, 2022] Three DGP students join for their Fall rotations: Maalavika Pillai, Sanaz Ghotbaldini, and Abhishek Thakkar joined the Goyal lab for their Fall rotations. Welcome all!

[August 2, 2022] Graduate students receive competitive grants: Emmie Grody and Grace Allard received competitive training grant awards from Synthesizing Biology Across Scales NRT and CMBD respectively to support their PhD work in the Goyal lab for the next two years.

[July 7, 2022] Yogesh featured in Schmidt Science Fellows Annual Report: Featured in the Schmidt Science Fellows 2020-2021 Annual Report, Yogesh reflects on his interdisciplinary journey since being a fellow in 2018. Read the case study here.

[June 21, 2022] Summer undergraduate students: The lab will host a few summer undergraduate students, all of whom won competitive awards for their summer internships. The students include: Sharon Choi (URP, NU Bioscientist), Sarah Sajjad (URP, NU Bioscientist), Emilia Hojel (BME SURA), and Julia Jimenez (NSF SynBio REU).

[May 31, 2022] PhD students Emmie Grody and Grace Allard join the lab: Emmie Grody and Grace Allard, Driskill Graduate Program students, have joined as PhD students following their spring rotation in the Goyal lab! We are excited to have Emmie and Grace join as the first PhD students in the lab!

[April 22, 2022] Jonas Braun awarded a prestigious fellowship: Jonas Braun, a visiting scholar in the Goyal lab, received DAAD IFI for his work in the lab, a prestigious fellowship awarded to students interested in artificial intelligence, computer science and related fields. Lab members joined to celebrate Jonas’ good news!

[March 28, 2022] New rotations students: We welcome three rotation students from DGP graduate program in our lab for their spring rotations! Welcome Grace Allard, Emmie Grody, and Ziyang Zhang!

[February 03, 2022] New preprint out: Wonderful new preprint spearheaded by Karun Kiani on the concordance (aka lack thereof) between chromatin accessibility and the ensuing gene expression in cells exposed to signaling molecules. Was fun collaborating with Karun! Link here.

[January 06, 2022] New paper out in PLoS Genetics: Our new collaborative work with Girish Deshpande at Princeton University on the interplay between preformation and epigenesis in specifying primordial germ cell fate during the early Drosophila embryogenesis is out now in PLOS Genetics. Link here.

2021

[December 18, 2021] Sharon Choi joining in Spring 2022: We are excited to have Sharon Choi join as an undergraduate researcher in Spring 2022 until the end of the Summer (and potentially beyond)! This will be Sharon’s first research experience and we are excited that she decided to join the Goyal lab.

[December 10, 2021] New Preprint out: Our new work on developing and implementing FateMap, a lineage tracing framework which revealed that diverse resistant fates arise from homogenous cancer cells upon treatment with anti-cancer drugs, and this diversity is driven by cell-intrinsic factors and is independent of environmental factors. Link.

[November 16, 2021] Yogesh chosen as a STAT Wunderkind 2021: Yogesh was selected to be a part of the 2021 cohort of STAT Wunderkinds, an yearly award from STAT News that recognizes early career researchers in academia and industry. Thanks to the mentors and peers for nominating Yogesh!

[October 01, 2021] Jonas Braun will join as the first lab member: Jonas Braun is a mathematics Masters student at the Technical University of Munich. Joans will join the Goyal lab in Feb 2022 as a visiting scholar and work on applying machine learning algorithms to better decouple signal from noise in single-cell -omics datasets. Looking forward to learning and discovering together with Jonas!

[September 06, 2021] Departmental seminar at the Indian Institute of Science: Yogesh gave a departmental seminar in BioSystems Science and Engineering at the Indian Institute of Science on FateMap as a framework to track therapy resistance in cancer. Thanks Mohit Jolly for the invite!

[June 17, 2021] Talk at Society for Mathematical Biology: Yogesh gave a talk at the annual meeting of the Society for Mathematical Biology on single-cell systems biology approaches to study therapy resistance in cancer. Thanks Mohit Jolly for the invite!

[March 26, 2021] Joining Northwestern University as Assistant Professor in Spring 2022: Yogesh will be joining the Department of Cell and Developmental Biology and Center for Synthetic Biology at Northwestern University to start his own lab in Spring 2022. The Goyal Lab has openings for graduate students, postdocs, and lab techs.