Westley Dang
CSO & Principal

At IndieBio, Westley leads deal sourcing and diligence, as well as working with startups with best practices, poking holes in their science, and bomb-proofing their business models. He’s is a process-oriented systems thinker, and loves tinkering with productivity tools and workflows. Half way through grad school, he realized that he was more concerned about the looming threat of climate change, so he spent his non-lab time volunteering with the Surfrider Foundation San Diego as co-chair for the Rise Above Plastics committee and an Executive Committee member, where he focused on private and legislative efforts to reduce single-use plastic consumption in San Diego. When not in a pomodoro trance, he’s dreaming up crazy what-ifs and loves connecting really distant dots together.

He did his PhD in neuroscience in the lab of Mark Mayford at The Scripps Research Institute, where they used genetically-encoded markers to study neural ensembles thought to be the substrate for learning and memory. His project focused on the impact of aging on the ability to reactivate neurons during memory recall. He did his undergrad at the University of Puget Sound in Tacoma, WA, majoring in biochemistry with a neuroscience emphasis. In his free time loves to cook, climb, surf, and hug trees.

Fun fact: He lived out of his car for 5 years during grad school, and quantified where he parked every night for three years because he loves graphs.

An adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered. An inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered.

G.K. Chesterton