Dave Van Veen

I build AI systems that advance medicine at scale.

Currently, I'm a Principal AI Scientist at HOPPR, where I develop multimodal models in radiology. My focus: building agentic systems across the ML stack—model training, data pipelines, and evaluation. I thrive in high-stakes domains where decisions must be factual, safe, and human-aligned.

Beyond building, I seek adventure—like bikepacking across Mexico—and solitude in nature via reading, surfing, and trail running with my dog.

bio

Dave earned his PhD in Electrical Engineering (EE) from Stanford under Akshay Chaudhari and John Pauly, where he developed algorithms for computational imaging and foundation models for medicine. He published 15+ papers (2400+ citations) across Nature, Nature Medicine, CVPR, ACL, et al.

Previously, Dave was a research scientist at a Bay Area start-up and Stanford's AIMI Center. He earned his MS at the University of Texas conducting machine learning research under Alex Dimakis and Sriram Vishwanath. Dave also served as a Data Science for Social Good fellow in London. During his BS in EE at the University of Wisconsin, he founded Badgerloop, a 150-person team that built a hyperloop pod for SpaceX.