Paul Valiant joined the faculty at Brown University in 2012 after completing his PhD at MIT and a postdoc at UC Berkeley. Valiant is interested in how computational tools and perspectives can address fundamental problems in other sciences, including the grand challenges of understanding protein folding, evolution and fluid dynamics. Tackling these problems requires a mix of theoretical insights, an interest in the specifics of the relevant sciences, and large-scale computer resources. More theoretical research directions he has pursued include studying statistical properties of distributions, and cryptographic and algorithmic game theory.