[3] In 2019, Vale was named executive director of the Janelia Research Campus and a vice president of HHMI; his appointment began in early 2020.

For his grade 10 science project, he set up a laboratory at the basement of his home to investigate the circadian rhythm of bean plants.

His guidance counselor contacted Karl Hammer at the University of California, Los Angeles, who allowed Vale to continue his experiments at his laboratory.

[1] He entered the College of Creative Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara, and earned a bachelor's degree in chemistry and biology in 1980.

[7] During his study, he first worked at the laboratory of C. Fred Fox at UCLA, then at Robert Lefkowitz's group at Duke University, earning him two articles published in 1984[8] and 1982,[9] respectively.

He then heard of the research of Michael Sheetz and James Spudich, who used a video camera on a microscope to film myosin-coated beads moving along actin filaments.

[11] They found that membrane organelle transport occurred bidirectionally on a microtubule, and not actin filament as Vale had originally thought.

[12] Vale further demonstrated that purified organelles by themselves rarely moved on microtubules, but movement was observed after adding the cytosol of the axon.

[24] Vale founded iBiology in 2006, a non-profit organization that produces and disseminates free online videos by leading biologists, speaking about biological principles and their research, and scientific training and professional development for practicing scientists.

Between 2004 and 2008, Vale and Tim Mitchison co-directed the Physiology Course at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, transforming it into an interdisciplinary training environment that brings together biologists, physicists and computational scientists.

He founded ASAPbio (Accelerating Science and Publication in Biology) in 2015, promoting the use of preprints and an open and transparent peer-review process.