My short story

- My name is Baltazar Espinoza Cortes. I'm originally from Manzanillo, Colima, a coastal town located in the southwest region of Mexico.

- I recieved a Ph. D. in Mathematical Modeling from the Arizona State University in 2018. My work focused on addressing problems in Mathematical Biology, specifically I focused on studying the impact of heterogeneous infection-risk environments on the Ebola Virus Disease dynamics with my advisor Dr. Carlos Castillo-Chavez.

- In 2018 I received a Postdoctoral Scholar position at the Arizona State University. In 2019 I was double appointed as a Visiting Postdoctoral Scholar at Brown University and as a Postdoctoral Scholar at the Arizona State University.

- In my free time I enjoy playing different type of videogames. Chess has been a part of my life and I had the opportunity to qualify 3 times in the Regional Mexican Chess Youth Olympics.

I received my bachelor's degree in Mathematics at the Univesity of Colima, in 2012. My advisor was Dr. Ricardo A. Saenz Casas. From my dissertation work on harmonic analysis on fractals, and getting lot of help from my former advisor Dr. Saenz, I got my first scientific publication: Restrictions of harmonic functions and Dirichlet eigenfunctions of the Hata set to the interval.

It was several years after the publication of this article that I had the opportunity to meet with a colleague who told me that researchers at PEMEX (the Mexican state-owned petroleum company), were using some of the results in my paper to study the pressure experienced by the drilling pipe during the oil extraction process. It was very exciting for me to realize that somebody in fact read my work, it was even more exciting for me the fact that the results of my reseach were used in such an important process in industry.

After the completion of my bachelor's degree in Mexico, I worked for two years lecturing undergraduate mathematics courses in private schools in Colima. During these two years, I also attended English courses to meet the language proficiency required to study in the USA.

I started my graduate education in 2014, I was offered a full scholarship to study applied mathematics at the Simon A. Levin Mathematical, Computational and Modeling Sciences Center at Arizona State University.

I got my Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics at Arizona State University in 2018. My advisor was Dr. Carlos Castillo-Chavez, and I mainly worked in epidemiology under his mentorship.

My dissertation entitled Consequences of Short Term Mobility Across Heterogeneous Risk Environments: The 2014 West African Ebola Outbreak, is a work that highlights the epidemiological consequences of building populations exhibiting high socio-economic disparities.

During my graduate careeer I had amazingly enriching opportunities. I was given the opportunity and training to participate in local and international programs focused on teaching math and research skills to undergraduate students from under-represented minorities as well as international undergraduate and graduate students from Latin America and Asia.

For five years I worked as a mentor at the Mathematical and Theoretical Biology Institute (MTBI), since 2015 to 2019.

I also published some articles in epidemiology.