Bio

Vijay S. Pande is a professor of chemistry, structural biology, and computer science (by courtesy) at Stanford University and the director of Stanford's Biophysics Program. As a teenager he was the third employee of Naughty Dog, which went on to ship 6.8 million copies of Crash Bandicoot for the Sony Playstation. Currently he is the founder and director of Folding@Home, a massive distributed computing project that integrates volunteered computers and PlayStations to perform simulations of protein folding and computational drug design for disease research. Folding@Home was the fastest distributed supercomputer in the world for several years and is the current Guinness world-record holder for "most powerful distributed computing network". Professor Pande's current work includes novel simulation methods for high-precision drug binding affinity calculations, protein design, and synthetic bio-mimetic polymers.