Ria Goyal took a gap year after she graduated from the University of Texas, Austin in May 2023. But she didn’t spend the next 12 months backpacking around Europe.
Instead, she was working in a lab at the University of Notre Dame, doing breast cancer research.
“I was looking into estrogen receptor positive breast cancer, which is a certain subtype of breast cancer, the most common type,” she said. “I was looking into a specific biochemical mechanism that we uncovered in the lab and seeing if there’s a way that we can target that for patients, finding new drugs and therapies for patients who are getting metastatic progressions in areas outside of the primary tumor site of the of the mammary gland.”
Having just finished her undergraduate degree, Goyal found herself working with “a lot of great grad students and post docs” in the lab of Dr. Laurie Littlepage, the Campbell Family Associate Professor of Cancer Research in the department of chemistry and biochemistry at Notre Dame.
Just like Goyal, Littlepage graduated from Vanguard College Preparatory School and the University of Texas. Littlepage then earned a Ph.D. at Harvard, where Goyal will be starting medical school this month.
This past year actually marked Goyal’s third stint working in Littlepage’s lab. She spent two summers during her high school years there as well, working on breast cancer research.
“After high school, going to medical school was my aim,” she said. “So I was thinking I could either go straight (to medical school) or I can continue this project, kind of see it through because we’re about to publish that work hopefully, so I wanted to wrap it up nicely.”
Goyal will be a step ahead of many of her peers in medical school, as she’s already had one academic paper published and another is in the pipeline. Those papers are the result of additional research she conducted at UT’s Dell Medical School during her undergraduate career.
Overachieving isn’t a new thing for Goyal. She was in the top 1% of her class — with a 4.0 grade point average — at Texas, and was the 2023 recipient of the President’s Student Employee of the Year Award. She was a senior resident assistant at UT, and “her SRA job with University Housing & Dining has allowed her to show her resourcefulness and integrity, especially during the pandemic and winter storms. She has gone above and beyond to help share her experience and compassion to help train other Resident Assistants and to help staff in UHD,” the university said in a news release last year.
She was also one of 27 students who were named Dean’s Honored Graduates for the College of Natural Sciences.
Goyal was the top graduate at Vanguard in 2019. She was a National Merit finalist; was awarded the President’s Volunteer Gold Service Award; was the Texas Association of Private and Parochial Schools top chemistry medalist; and twice earned a superior rating in TAPPS solo violin competitions.
And even though her focus is now in the sciences, Goyal said she was inspired most by her English teachers at Vanguard, specifically Sarah Lieber, Dr. Wendy Allman and Jennifer Ferretter.
“They really helped me critically analyze stories, narratives, accounts, in order to tease out the important details, as well as empathize with lives that I’ve never lived,” Goyal said. “I think that that is a really difficult skill to engender in people, especially in our day and age. I think everyone has a unique story and there’s a lot of times that it just feels overwhelming, so being able to empathize with the other person and to really understand their suffering is a way to advocate for them.”
Lieber said she’s not surprised by Goyal’s ability to apply lessons learned in English classes to other disciplines.
“Even as a high school student, Ria was a strong, creative thinker. She would not rest until she completely understood a text or a subject completely, whether that meant investigating the motivations of a character or the possible implications of an author’s diction or syntax across a poem or a novel,” said Lieber, who is head of the English department at Vanguard, where she’s taught for 15 years. “Her attention to detail meant that she wrote interesting, insightful essays. Great physicians know that patients are people, and I am confident Ria will be a great physician.”
Coming out of high school, Goyal was one of WACOAN’s Star Students, and told the magazine’s writer Juliana Mudd that she was considering Rice University and Vanderbilt University.
“I did have multiple options, but I felt like (UT) was close enough to home, but not too close,” she said recently. “I think it was that sweet middle. A lot of my friends went to Baylor, and we have great connections there, but that was too close to home. And then Rice and Vanderbilt were two that I was considering but were too far.”
At Texas, Goyal was a Plan II honors and biochemistry major, which combined the science classes that prepared her for medical school with courses in other disciplines.
“I was taking things like philosophy, world literature, medical racism classes, antibiotic resistance, conflict resolution,” she said. “All these different courses that kept me constantly challenging myself and taking these tests along with theater majors, communications majors, engineers, all these different people, so I really appreciated that experience and that’s really what I wanted out of a college experience, which is why I
chose UT.”
Goyal was also one of the founders of the Austin chapter of Texas Dollar For, an organization which helps with the elimination of medical debt for patients in need.
Goyal chose Harvard for medical school over Stanford, Yale, Vanderbilt, Texas and Baylor College of Medicine in Houston.
“I need the kind of foundation that I’ve created with biochemical intuition as well as the community service, and the leaders in that front are at these huge institutions, especially Harvard Med,” she said. “There are people out there that are on the ground working to further the system. And I want to lead the charge there and learn from the best and hopefully bring that kind of knowledge and gung-ho spirit back to Texas.”
Goyal spent part of her early life in Tennessee and then she and her mother Vibha Goyal, a nurse practitioner, moved to Waco when Goyal was in the fifth grade. Her interest in breast cancer research dates back to her elementary school days.
“I had a guidance counselor years ago who had been ravaged by this disease, and I really saw the community come and rally around her support her,” she said. “Then in high school, I volunteered at Hillcrest in the Breast Care Center, mainly mammography. I met really nice nurses, the radiologist who read those scans, the front desk staff, every single person was really involved in caring for those patients. I got to see the imaging of breast tumors, the early stages of that process and then realizing that I want to know more about the biochemical underpinnings of how this disease occurs and how we can help these patients because early diagnosis is important.”
