Vijay S. Pande

Vijay Satyanand Pande is a Trinidadian–American scientist and venture capitalist. Pande is best known for orchestrating the distributed computing protein-folding research project known as Folding@home. His research is focused on distributed computing and computer-modelling of microbiology, and on improving computer simulations regarding drug-binding, protein design, and synthetic biomimetic polymers. He is currently a general partner at venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz.

Career
Pande is an adjunct professor of structural biology at Stanford University. Previously, he was the Henry Dreyfus Professor of Chemistry and professor of structural biology and of computer science. He was also director of the biophysics program.

In 2015, Pande became the ninth general partner at Andreessen Horowitz. He is the founding investor of their Bio + Health Fund.

Pande serves on the boards of Apeel Sciences, Bayesian Health, BioAge Labs, Citizen, Devoted Health, Freenome, Insitro, Nautilus Biotechnology, Nobell, Omada Health, Q.bio, and Scribe Therapeutics, a CRISPR company co-founded by 2020 Nobel Laureate Jennifer Doudna. He has also been a founder and advisor to startups in Silicon Valley.

Pande has written for Time, STAT News, Fortune, and the New York Times, among others.

Globavir Biosciences, Inc.
In 2014, Pande co-founded Globavir Biosciences, an infectious disease startup addressing antibiotic resistance threats in developed countries as well as needs in viral infections around the world, including Ebola and dengue fever.

Pande Lab at Stanford University
Pande founded the Pande Lab at Stanford University. The lab brings together researchers from many departments, including chemistry, computer science, structural biology, physics, biophysics, and biochemistry.

Distributed computing
Pande is the founder of the Folding@home research project. The protein-folding computer simulations from the Folding@home project are said to be "quantitatively" comparable to real-world experimental results. The method for this yield has been called a "holy grail" in computational biology. Folding@home was recognized by the Guinness Book of World Records in 2007 as the most powerful distributed computing network in the world.

Pande directed the now-defunct Genome@home project with the goal to understand the nature of genes and proteins by virtually designing new forms of them. Genome@home started to close as early as March 2004, after accumulating a large database of protein sequences.

Some of the programs and libraries involved are free software with GPL, LGPL, and BSD licenses, but the Folding@home client and core remain proprietary.

Stanford Bitcoin Group and Bitcoin Mafia
With colleague Balaji Srinivisan, Pande supervised the Stanford Bitcoin Group, a bitcoin research team born of hackathon activities in Pande and Srinvisan’s Stanford CS 184 class. The Stanford Bitcoin Group consisted of seven core members and included Ryan Breslow, a founder of Cognito, a developer at Coinbase and then Netflix, and a developer at Google.

Early life and education
Pande graduated from Langley High School's class of 1988 while growing up in McLean, Virginia. In 1992, Pande received his B.A. in physics from Princeton University. He received a PhD in physics from MIT in 1995.

While in high school, Pande won fourth place in the 1988 Westinghouse Science Talent Search for a computer simulation of a space-based ballistic missile defense.

After graduating from high school in 1988, Pande worked briefly at the video game development company Naughty Dog in the early 1990s while in his late teens, serving as a programmer and designer on their 1991 release Rings of Power. While Pande was attending MIT and Naughty Dog was based in Boston, he portrayed the secret boss character in the 3DO fighting game Way of the Warrior.

He is married, has two children and likes cats.

Awards
In 2002, he was named a Frederick E. Terman Fellow and an award recipient of MIT Technology Review's TR100. The following year, he was awarded the Henry and Camille Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar award. In 2004, he received a Technovator award from Global Indus Technovators in its Biotech/Med/Healthcare category. In 2006, Pande was awarded the Irving Sigal Young Investigator Award from the Protein Society. In 2008, he was named "Netxplorateur of 2008". Also in 2008 he was given the Thomas Kuhn Paradigm Shift Award and became a Fellow of the American Physical Society. Pande received the 2012 Michael and Kate Bárány Award for developing computational models for proteins and RNA. He is the second person to ever win both the "Protein Society Young Investigator Award" and "Biophysical Society Young Investigator" award. In 2015, Pande received the DeLano Award for Computational Biosciences, as well as the Camille and Henry Dreyfus Distinguished Chair in Chemistry.