Even a global pandemic during their late middle school and early high school years couldn’t stop these 10 teens from showing us their capacity for overcoming adversity to excel in the arts, academics, athletics and so much more. Come meet the multi-hyphenates (entrepreneur/rower/debater! scientist/dancer/class president!) who represent the best of Stamford’s next generation. This year’s group of talented young people impressed us by how they made their mark being true to themselves, leaning into their personal interests to shine. If there is a through line that connects them all, it is an authenticity that seems to belie their age. No matter our own stage of life, we all have a lot to learn from and be inspired by their passion and determination. We look forward to watching their stories unfold. This is simply the first act.
See the rest of this year’s Stamford Teens to Watch.
Saachi GOYAL
Academy of Information Technology & Engineering
During the Covid-lockdown, Saachi Goyal found herself looking for an intellectual challenge beyond her middle school’s virtual classrooms when she learned Harvard was offering a free online neuroscience class. “I had wanted to be a neurosurgeon since I started watching ‘Grey’s Anatomy’. We didn’t have much school work, so I enrolled,” she says.
That course super-charged her already innate scientific curiosity. Goyal spent her summer reaching out to medical researchers whose work she admired, asking them for opportunities to join their projects. There was a lot of rejection. “I was in eighth grade, and I found a lot of people just weren’t interested in me,” she says. Still, she persisted.
Her tenacity paid off when Dr. Rachel Amy Ross, a physician/researcher affiliated with the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, said yes. “She’s a neuroscientist and endocrinologist with an interest in women’s health. There was a lot of things about her work that I loved.”
Goyal’s work in Dr. Ross’s lab inspired an independent research project that earned her state and international honors this year. She has been developing an automated process for tracking the menstrual cycles of mice. Why do the menstrual cycles of mice matter? “Hormones impact so much from metabolism to behavior,” she says. “It’s a factor that should be considered in research, but no one was tracking it.”
Her work took first prize in the 2024 Connecticut Urban School Challenge where she also received the Joseph Gerber Award for Excellence. That earned her an invite to Los Angeles to compete with 70 young science researchers from around the globe, where she placed third in the computational biology and bioinformatics category. “A lot of things have really come together this year,” Goyal says humbly of her third-in-the-world placement.
It’s Goyal’s long-term goal to see her ongoing work influence future medical studies by recognizing the role of hormones in research outcomes. “If you look at a lot of medical research, a lot of what’s true for males is also just assumed of females,” she says. “The hope is that we’re creating a baseline for looking at things in a different way.”
While this is demanding work, Goyal still finds time to pursue other passions. She was junior class president and dances at the Locus Performing Arts Center. Her favorite styles include hip-hop and contemporary. “It’s less technical and more about being free form, and I like being able to express myself that way,” she says. “But the best thing for me is I just get to unwind and be with my friends.”
Back at the lab, Goyal aspires to harness science and technology in more novel ways, perhaps through biomedical entrepreneurship. “Science will help us solve so many of the problems we are facing, and I believe there’s so much more to discover.”
POP QUIZ
What is your dream job?
“[RUNNING] My own biotech company—perhaps one that takes on climate change issues a little more.”