Vijay Pande

Vijay Pande, PhD, is a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, as well as an Adjunct Professor of Bioengineering at Stanford University, where he continues to advise the Pande Lab — focused on tackling challenging problems in chemical biology, biophysics, and biomedicine. As the founding investor on the a16z bio fund, Pande leads the firm’s investments in, and guides startups at, the cross section of biology and computer science, including applications in computation, machine learning, and artificial intelligence to healthcare; digital therapeutics; diagnostics; and novel transformative scientific advances applied to industry more broadly, taking bio beyond healthcare. His work leading the thinking in this emerging space has also appeared in op-eds for the New York Times, Scientific American, Forbes, and other media.

Previously, Vijay was the Henry Dreyfus Professor of Chemistry and Professor of Structural Biology and of Computer Science at Stanford University. He led a team of researchers pioneering computational methods and their application to medicine and biology, resulting in over 200 publications, two patents, and two novel drug treatments. Concurrently, he was the director of the Biophysics program at Stanford, where he led a team of more than 50 Stanford faculty members and propelled the program to the top in the country.

As a PhD entrepreneur, Vijay founded the Folding@Home Distributed Computing Project for disease research, pushing the boundaries of developing and applying computer science techniques (such as distributed systems, machine learning, and exotic computer architectures) into biology and medicine — in both fundamental research as well as the development of new therapeutics. During his time at Stanford, Vijay also co-founded Globavir Biosciences, where he translated his research advances into a successful startup, discovering cures for Dengue Fever and Ebola.

Vijay received a BA in Physics from Princeton University and a PhD in Physics from MIT. He was awarded the DeLano Prize in Computation, Guinness World Record for Folding@Home, and American Chemical Society Thomas Kuhn Paradigm Shift Award, and was also selected for MIT TR10. In his teens, Vijay was the first employee at video game startup Naughty Dog Software, maker of Crash Bandicoot.