Biography:

Van Savage received his BS degree in physics with a minor in mathematics from Rhodes College in Memphis, TN where he graduated Phi Beta Kappa. He did his graduate work in theoretical physics at Washington University in St. Louis under advisors Carl Bender and Claude Bernard where he received a PhD for his thesis, Analytical and numerical techniques for studying PT-symmetric but non-Hermitian Hamiltonians. During graduate school, Savage was awarded a six-month NSF fellowship for research at the Santa Fe Institute. While there, Savage began his biological research by studying allometric relationshipshow biological rates and times, such as metabolic rate and lifespan, depend on body size and body temperature across species. Savage returned as a postdoctoral fellow to the Santa Fe Institute and Los Alamos National Laboratory where he was advised by Geoffrey West and James Brown. During this time, he continued his studies of biological scaling and focused on models for the structure and dynamics of vascular systems as shaped by evolutionary forces. Next, Savage moved to Harvard University as a systems biology postdoctoral fellow and then to Harvard Medical School as an Instructor. Savage used this time to combine allometric relationships, vascular system models, and evolutionary principles in order to address a wide range of questions that pertain to sleep, cell size, tumor growth, population growth and mortality, and speciation-extinction dynamics. In January 2009, Savage began an appointment as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Biomathematics at the UCLA Medical Center.

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