David Van Valen seeks to understand how living systems link environmental information to changes in cellular behavior with signaling pathways. To study this question, his lab combines ideas from cell biology and physics with advances in imaging, genomics, and artificial intelligence to increase the scope and scale of biological measurements. By integrating information about signaling activity, gene expression, and cellular behaviors at the level of single cells, Van Valen and his team hope to understand the mechanisms behind cellular information processing and how these are perturbed in human disease states.