J. Galen Buckwalter was born and raised near Lancaster, Pennsylvania as a part of the Mennonite community known as Pennsylvania Dutch. Slightly before his 17th birthday, Galen met with an unfortunate diving accident that has required him to rely on a wheelchair for mobility ever since. As he describes it, "it enabled him to focus exclusively on the world of his mind". He completed an undergraduate degree near Erie, PA and then came to Los Angeles to complete a doctorate in psychology. After engaging in research with USC, Galen partnered with Neil Clark Warren to become the founding chief science officer of eHarmony. He was there for seven or eight years and ultimately left to head back to USC, joining their Institute for Creative Technologies. From there he became involved with a handful of startups. Most recently, in addition to a number of advising roles, he is the Co-Founder and CEO of psyML, a company focused on applying psychometric models to big data sets at scale.