“My wife, Erin Tevonian, and I both graduated last week with our PhDs in biological engineering, a program we started together when we arrived at MIT in fall 2019. At the time, we had already been dating for three years, having met as classmates in the bioengineering program at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2015. We went through college together — taking classes, vacationing with friends, and biking cross-country, all side-by-side — and so we were lucky to be able to continue doing so by coming to Course 20 at MIT together. It was during our graduate studies at MIT that we got engaged (spring 2022) and married (last September), a milestone that we were able to celebrate with the many wonderful friends we found at MIT.

First-year students in the MIT Biological Engineering PhD program rotate through labs of interest before picking where they will complete their doctorates, and so we found our way to research groups by January 2020 just before the Covid-19 pandemic disrupted on-campus research and caused social distancing. Erin completed her PhD in Doug Lauffenburger and Linda Griffith’s labs, during which she used computational and experimental models to study human insulin resistance and built better liver tissue models for recapitulating disease pathology. I completed my PhD in Anders Hansen’s lab and studied how DNA folds in 3D space to drive gene regulation by building and applying a new method for mapping DNA architecture at finer resolutions than previously possible. The years flew by as we dove into our research projects, and we defended our PhDs a week apart back in April.

Erin and I were standing at Commencement with the Class of 2025 at the moment this photo was snapped, smiling as we listened to MIT’s school song. Graduation is a bittersweet milestone because it represents the end of what has been an incredible adventure for us, an adventure that made campus feel like home, so I must admit that I wasn’t sure how I would feel going into graduation week. This moment, though, felt like a fitting close for our time at MIT, and I was filled with gratitude for the many memories, opportunities, and adventures I got to share with Erin over the course of grad school. I also graduated from the MIT Sloan School of Management/School of Engineering’s Leaders for Global Operations program (hence the stole), so I was also reflecting on the many folks I’ve met across campus that make MIT the wonderful place that it is, and how special it is to be a part of a community that makes it so hard to say goodbye.”

—Viraat Goel MBA ’25, PhD ’25

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