Dr. Goel received her BA in Psychology and Anthropology from the University of California, Berkeley and her PhD in Biological Psychology from the University of Michigan (Ann Arbor). As a graduate student, she researched the behavioral and neuroanatomical substrates underlying circadian rhythms in an animal model. As a postdoctoral fellow at Columbia and Cornell Universities, Dr. Goel made the transition to human work, conducting studies on basic human physiological sleep and on seasonal affective disorder (SAD), a mood disorder which may result from circadian rhythm pathophysiology.