In 2015, Pande became the ninth general partner at Andreessen Horowitz. He is the founding investor of their Bio + Health Fund.[5]
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 LaureateJennifer Doudna. He has also been a founder and advisor to startups in Silicon Valley.[6]
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.[4]
Distributed computing
Pande is the founder of the Folding@home research project.[4] 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.[12][13] Folding@home was recognized by the Guinness Book of World Records in 2007 as the most powerful distributed computing network in the world.[14]
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,[15] after accumulating a large database of protein sequences.[15][16]
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.[17]
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.[18]
He is married, has two children and likes cats.[1]
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.[3] In 2004, he received a Technovator award from Global Indus Technovators in its Biotech/Med/Healthcare category.[25] In 2006, Pande was awarded the Irving Sigal Young Investigator Award from the Protein Society. In 2008, he was named "Netxplorateur of 2008".[25] Also in 2008 he was given the Thomas Kuhn Paradigm Shift Award and became a Fellow of the American Physical Society.[2] Pande received the 2012 Michael and Kate Bárány Award for developing computational models for proteins and RNA.[2][25] He is the second person to ever win both the "Protein Society Young Investigator Award" and "Biophysical Society Young Investigator" award.[26] In 2015, Pande received the DeLano Award for Computational Biosciences, as well as the Camille and Henry Dreyfus Distinguished Chair in Chemistry.[27][28]
An introduction to Markov state models and their application to long timescale molecular simulation. Gregory R. Bowman, Vijay Pande, Frank Noé. Dordrecht. 2014. Springer. ISBN978-94-007-7606-7
Grosberg, A. IU. (1994). Statistical physics of macromolecules. A. R. Khokhlov. New York: AIP Press. ISBN1-56396-071-0