Goyal attended Malcolm Price Laboratory School in
Cedar Falls, Iowa, through graduation from its
Northern University High School division. He received BS and BSE degrees from the
University of Iowa in 1993 and MS and PhD degrees from
University of California, Berkeley, in 1995 and 1998, respectively. From 1998 to 2000 he served as a Member of Technical Staff at
Bell Labs, and from 2001 to 2003 served as a Senior Research Engineer at
Digital Fountain. He returned to UC Berkeley in 2003 as a visiting scholar, and from 2004 to 2013 was with the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, including holding the Esther and
Harold E. Edgerton chair in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. He has been with
Boston University since 2016, after two years with the
Nest Labs division of
Alphabet Inc. Scientific contributions Goyal coauthored the 2014 textbook
Foundations of Signal Processing with
Martin Vetterli and
Jelena Kovačević, which was reviewed in IEEE Signal Processing Magazine. In 2013, Goyal's group invented
first-photon imaging, a method to generate 3D depth and reflectivity images from exactly one detected photon per pixel, even when up to half of the detected photons are due to ambient light. Publication of an article introducing the method in
Science resulted in widespread news coverage. In an article published in
Nature in 2019, Goyal's group introduced a method for non-line-of-sight (NLOS) imaging that uses only an ordinary digital camera. This contrasts with many earlier methods that use pulsed laser illumination and detectors sensitive to single photons. He later collaborated on work that extended laser-based NLOS imaging to 1.43 km stand-off distance. U.S. patents have been issued for 21 of Goyal's inventions. == Awards and honors ==