David Van Valen

David Van Valen, MD, PhD, is a faculty member in the Division of Biology and Bioengineering at the California Institute of Technology. His research group’s long-term interest is to develop a quantitative understanding of how living systems process, store, and transfer information, and to unravel how this information processing is perturbed in human disease states. To that end, his group leverages — and pioneers — the latest advances in imaging, genomics, and machine learning to produce quantitative measurements with single-cell resolution as well as predictive models of living systems. Dr. Van Valen’s academic training and research experiences have been at the interfaces of several fields. He studied mathematics and physics as an undergraduate at MIT (graduated 2003), biophysics at Caltech (graduated 2011), and medicine at the University of California, Los Angeles (graduated 2013). He was then a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford, where he trained in systems biology, machine learning, bioinformatics, and single-cell genomics, prior to rejoining Caltech as faculty in 2018.