Dr. José M. Ponciano is a Professor at the Department of Biology, University of Florida. He earned his BS and Licenciatura in Biology from the Universidad del Valle de Guatemala in 1998 and an MS in Ecology from Universidad Austral de Chile in 2001. He then went on to obtain an MS in Statistics at the University of Idaho (2004). Two years later, he also completed his PhD in Bioinformatics and Computational Biology at the Mathematics Department of the University of Idaho. His research focuses on the use of stochastic processes in Biology. He views stochastic processes and statistics as the ideal language to translate fundamental questions in Biology into testable hypotheses that can be confronted with real data. This research focus grew from the application of stochastic processes in Ecology, Population Genetics, and Evolution to Wildlife Management, Conservation Biology, and Fisheries to Epidemiological Modeling, Microbial Community Ecology, Population Genetics, and Phylogenetics.