Ron Vale is an emeritus professor of cellular and molecular pharmacology at University of California, San Francisco, and maintains a lab at HHMI’s Janelia Research Campus. He was an HHMI Investigator from 1995 to 2020. In 2020, he became HHMI’s vice president and executive director of Janelia.
At UCSF, the Vale Lab combined cell biological and biophysical approaches to understand spatial organization, movement, and signaling within cells. The lab integrated biochemical, structural, and microscopy-based approaches to study these questions at scales that span from atomic information of proteins to the behavior of cells in living organisms. This led us down diverse avenues of research, but most of the lab projects fall into one of the following categories: