David Van Valen is an Assistant Professor in the Division of Biology and Bioengineering at the California Institute of Technology. His research group’s goal is to understand how living systems and their respective viruses process information to understand both their internal state and the world around them. To that end, his group leverages the latest advances in imaging, machine learning, and genomics to measure the interactions between viruses and their hosts. He is the recipient of several awards, and was named a Fannie and John Hertz Graduate Fellow (2005), a Rita Allen Foundation Scholar (2020), and a Pew-Stewart Scholar for Cancer Research (2021).