Senior Profile: Katie Goble, BC

Like all neuroscience and behavior majors, Kathleen Goble racks her brain with questions on, well, the brain. But Goble, unlike most others, can do it all in Spanish.

The senior graduating from Barnard College will research the interaction between brain cells and compounds in the immune system all while honing her language skills on a Fulbright Scholarship in Spain this coming academic year.

“I told all of the influential people on campus who had had an impact on me,” Goble said as she recounted opening the large acceptance envelope from the scholarship program. “But they already knew.”

For Goble, that long list of mentors, professors, and students is proof of her restless involvement over the past four years in Barnard’s academic and extracurricular life. Vice president of the senior class, an organizer of Senior Experience, and a coordinator of STRIVE—a program that endeavors to reduce educational and social barriers to teenagers with sickle-cell disease—Goble has become a presence at Barnard even with her challenging, science-intensive courseload.

Goble, who served on the Student Government Association since her second year, says she will miss her class’s solidarity. Senior Experience, which sponsors meals and hosts speakers to prepare seniors for postgraduate life, particularly unified the class this year. “People came out en masse,” Goble said of the unprecedented turnout she saw at a recent senior toast with Barnard President Debora Spar.

Goble has spent college straddling research in molecular biology and health-awareness education, but she sees an important connection between the two and wants to explore it in the future. Set to attend medical school at the University of Massachusetts after completing her Fulbright fellowship, she is considering pursuing both a medical degree and a doctorate. The dual degrees would enable her to research health problems in underserved populations while also providing primary care to them.

Two years ago, she worked in a parasitology lab in Granada, Spain on a grant from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. Her current on-campus research with psychologist Russell Romeo addresses the relationship between human maturation and stress levels, focusing on anxiety in adolescents—a demographic she is familiar with after her time on STRIVE.

That program exposed her to what she sees as the socially driven flaws of the U.S. health-care system. “One thing that has surprised me is how little research is actually done on sickle-cell disease,” she said.

Barnard biology professor Paul Hertz, who advised Goble since her first year of college and oversaw her as a teaching assistant for his introductory biology course, commented on the authenticity of Goble’s enthusiasm. “She pursued her interests,” he said. “She never directed her activities into those that would impress a medical school admissions committee.”