Assistant Professor of Biology and Bioengineering

Investigator, Heritage Medical Research Institute

HHMI Freeman Hrabowski Scholar

Caltech

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David Van Valen is an Assistant Professor in the Division of Biology and Bioengineering at Caltech. Before becoming faculty, he studied mathematics (B.S. 2003) and physics (B.S. 2003) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, applied physics (Ph.D. 2011) at Caltech, medicine (M.D. 2013) at UCLA, and bioengineering as a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University. At Caltech, his research group develops new technologies at the intersection of imaging, genomics, and machine learning to produce quantitative measurements of living systems with single-cell resolution. David is the recipient of several awards, including a Hertz Graduate Fellowship (2005), a Rita Allen Scholar award (2020), A Pew-Stewart Cancer Research Scholar award (2021), a Heritage Medical Research Investigator award (2021), a Moore Inventor Fellowship (2021), and the NIH New Innovator award (2022).

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The Van Valen Lab seeks to understand how living systems and their respective viruses process information to understand both their internal state and the world around them using he latest advances in imaging, machine learning, and genomics to measure the interactions between viruses and their hosts.