Rubem P. Mondaini is the president of the BIOMAT Consortium/International Institute for Interdisciplinary Mathematical and Biological Sciences (I3MBS) and a full professor at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. He holds a Ph.D. in theoretical physics from the Brazilian Centre for Physical Research, Brazil. His research activities abroad include a period as a visiting scientist at the International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP), Trieste, Italy (1978), and as a senior postdoc at the Department of Mathematics of King's College, University of London, UK (1986). He was also a visiting professor at the Centre of Physics of Condensed Matter, Lisbon, Portugal (1986), and at the Department of Chemical Engineering of Princeton University, Princeton, USA (2008). He has been the chairman of the Annual BIOMAT Conferences since their inception during the BIOMAT 2001 Symposium in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.