Ashish Goyal

Ashish Goyal is a recipient of India’s National Award for the Empowerment of Persons with Disabilities 2010. He was awarded on 3 December 2010 by President of India Pratibha Patil in New Delhi.[1] In 2015, he was named a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum.[2]

Goyal was the first blind student at Wharton Business School in Philadelphia. He graduated in 2008, earning an MBA with honours, and also winning the Joseph P Wharton award, given annually to a student who symbolizes "Wharton's way of life".

Goyal is a former trader at J P Morgan, and is credited as the first visually impaired trader in the world.[3] Since 2013, he has worked as a portfolio manager at London-Based BlueCrest Capital Management.[4] "Goyal uses screen-reading software to check his e-mail, read research reports and look at presentations. When he needs to read graphs, which the software cannot do, he goes through the data and tries to imagine the graph in his head."[3]

Goyal was born and raised in Mumbai, India. Born with perfect vision, he has retinitis pigmentosa, which caused his vision to deteriorate from age 9; by 22 he was entirely blind.[5] He dealt with this adversity by focusing his energies on academics. Goyal stood second in his class at Narsee Monjee Institute of Management Studies in Mumbai and also won the 2003 Dun and Bradstreet Best Student Award.[6] He worked at ING Vysya Bank as a fixed income trader in Bangalore for three years before enrolling at Wharton in 2006. Ashish represented the Metro London Sports Club in 2009 and his team won the UK domestic blind cricket tournament.[3][7]

Goyal is an advocate for disability research and education issues for underprivileged children in India, having raised over $50,000 towards these causes in a 3-year span.[8] He currently lives in London with his wife, to whom he's been married since 2014.[9]