Dan Valente

Post-Doctoral Fellow
Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory

As a physicist working in neuroscience, Dan has been able to draw on his experience with biological networks and genetic algorithms to model the neural circuitry of memory. This work followed several years of research in acoustics. In a recent seminar that Dr. Valente gave at Hope, he described an engineering approach to the study of memory which complements the approaches used in psychology and in molecular genetics.

When asked about how he made the transition from Hope College to his graduate program, Dan responded:

"First of all, I want to say thanks to all of you. The education I received in the department has made the transition to grad school hardly a transition at all. Although I found much of undergrad to be very difficult and demanding, I am thankful that you made us work so hard."  Dan Valente has recently completed his Ph.D. at Penn State and is doing biophysics research on the "Integration of Gene and Neural Nets" at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory.