Dr. Carlos Castillo-Chavez is a Regents Professor, a Joaquin Bustoz Jr. Professor of Mathematical Biology, a Distinguished Sustainability Scientist and the Founding Director of the Simon A Levin Mathematical and Computational Modeling Sciences Center (SAL-MCMSC) at Arizona State University (ASU) who has co-authored nearly 250 publications and a dozen books, textbooks, research monographs and edited volumes.

He was born in Mexico City immigrating to the USA in 1974. Castillo-Chavez received his bachelor’s, master’s and PhD degrees from three campuses of the University of Wisconsin Stevens Point, Milwaukee and Madison, respectively. He reached the rank of full professor at Cornell University in 1997 where he spent 18 years before moving to ASU in 2004. Over his 30 years in academia, he has mentored 25 postdoctoral students. His 49 PhD students include 21 women, 27 from US underrepresented groups and 7 from Latin America. He has been a research co- mentor to nearly 500 undergraduates. According to the mathematics genealogy project, Castillo- Chavez is among the top 225 mentor of PhD students in the history of mathematics (http://www.genealogy.ams.org/most-students.php?count=225).

Recognitions to his work include: three White House Awards (1992,1997, and 2011), the 12th American Mathematical Society Distinguished Public Service Award in 2010, the 2007 AAAS Mentor award, the 17th recipient of the SIAM Prize for Distinguished Service to the Profession and Distinguished Alumni by UW Stevens Point. He is a fellow of the AAAS (American Association for the Advancement of Science; SIAM (Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics; Founding Fellow of the AMS (American Mathematical Society; and ACE (American College of Epidemiology). He has held honorary Professorships at Xi’an Jiatong University in China, the Universidad de Belgrano in Argentina and East Tennessee State University. Past appointments include a Stanislaw M. Ulam Distinguished Scholar at Los Alamos National Laboratory, a Cátedra Patrimonial at UNAM in México, and a Martin Luther King Jr. Professorship at MIT.

He was a member of the Board of Higher Education at the National Academy of Sciences (2009- 2015) and served in President Barack Obama Committee on the National Medal of Science (2010-2015). He holds external faculty appointments at Cornell University (2004- ), Santa Fe Institute (2005- ) and Universidad de los Andes, Colombia (2016- ).

His research lives at the interface of disease evolution, behavioral epidemiology, social dynamics, homeland security, epidemiology, addiction and sustainability. He is the inaugural recipient of the Dr. William Yslas Velez Outstanding STEM Award by the Victoria Foundation, co-sponsored by the Pasqua Yaqui Tribe of Arizona (2015).