Van Savage
External Professor
A major goal of Van's research is to quantify and understand the possible functions, forms, and interactions of biological systems that result in the extraordinary diversity in nature. I have studied a wide range of areas such as metabolic scaling, consumer-resource interactions, rates of evolution, effects of global warming on ecosystems, tumor growth, and sleep. Complementary to this, he aims to understand how much variation around optima or averages is considered healthy or adaptive versus diseased or disturbed states, which are essentially deviations from normal or sustainable functioning. As I attempt to make progress on these questions, he joins together ecology, evolutionary theory, physiology, mathematical modeling, image-analysis software, informatics, and biomedical sciences. Many theories, including some of my work, focus on optimal or average properties, but more recently, he has been working to obtain the large amounts of data necessary to characterize variation in key properties. His new findings about the diversity and variation in form and function are revealing flaws in current models, and he is currently working to develop new theories that incorporate realistic amounts of natural variation.
Van is a theoretical biologist with expertise across a range of biological and mathematical fields. His undergraduate degree was in physics from Rhodes College, and his PhD training was at Washington University in St. Louis in theoretical physics, working on alternative models for the Higgs Boson. This was followed by postdoctoral research experiences at the Santa Fe Institute, Los Alamos National Laboratory, and Harvard. Since 2009 he has been faculty at UCLA in the Departments of Computational Medicine as well as Ecology and Evolutionary Biology where he is now Full Professor. For more than twenty years, starting at the end of graduate school and beginning with his first postdoc, he has focused his theoretical, computing, data analysis, and conceptual techniques on studying biological problems such as effects of organismic size and temperature on physiology, ecology, and evolution, genome and cell size tradeoffs with metabolic rate, antibiotic resistance, branching vascular networks, sleep, tumor growth, species interactions, and stability of food webs.
Topics of Interest: Biology - Environment/Climate Change - Evolution - Health - Physics - Scaling - Time
How SFI changes your mind: Through all the brilliantly creative and encyclopedically knowledgeable characters I talk with at lunch and tea there and now through virtual zoom links.
When and how you first got involved with SFI:
Favorite Film: The Graduate