Speaker: Yogesh Goyal
Location: Biomedical Sciences Building, University of Galway
Date: Wednesday, 17th September 2025
Yogesh Goyal is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Cell and Developmental Biology and the McCormick School of Engineering at Northwestern University. He is also an investigator at the Chan Zuckerberg Biohub.
Yogesh grew up in a village in Jammu & Kashmir in India and has a multidisciplinary background with his undergraduate degree in engineering at IIT Gandhinagar, graduate research in quantitative developmental biology at Princeton University, and postdoctoral training in single-cell biology at the University of Pennsylvania.
The Goyal Lab is a curiosity-driven laboratory working on a range of biological problems, developing novel experimental, computational, and theoretical frameworks to monitor, perturb, model, and ultimately control single-cell variabilities and emergent fate choices in development and disease. Yogesh’s work has been recognized by Pew-Stewart Scholars Award, Burroughs Wellcome Fund Career Award, Jane Coffin Childs Fellowship, Cancer Research Foundation Young Investigator Award, STAT Wunderkinds, Forbeck Scholar, and Schmidt Science Fellowship.
The talk will focus on tracing decision-making in single cancer cells. Single cell variations within a genetically homogeneous population of cells can lead to significant differences in cell fate in response to external stimuli. This is particularly relevant in cancer cells, where a small population of cells can evade therapies to develop resistance. In this talk, Yogesh will present his work on tracing the origins, nature, and manifestations of single cell variations in response to a variety of cytotoxic chemotherapies and targeted therapies in various cancer models. By combining lineage tracing frameworks with computational analysis, he will discuss the determinants of cell fate outcomes across cancers and therapies. Quantitative and integrative designs provide a foundation for controlling single-cell variabilities in cancer and other biological contexts, such as stem cell reprogramming and host-viral interactions.
The seminar is hosted by Andrew Daly and Eoin McEvoy.
