Dr. Ruben Michael Ceballos is the director of the NSF Biology Integration Institute (BII) Host-Virus Evolutionary Dynamics Institute and a faculty member in the Department of Biological Sciences at the University of Arkansas (Fayetteville, AR). Dr. Ceballos earned a bachelor of science degree in Physics from the University of Alabama in Huntsville, a master’s degree in Behavioral Neuroscience from the University of Alabama at Birmingham, and a doctorate (i.e., PhD) in Microbiology and Biochemistry from the University of Montana. He was the recipient of the NASA Minority Institute Research Support award in 2006. Dr. Ceballos earned his PhD as part of an NSF IGERT PhD traineeship entitled the Montana Ecology of Infectious Disease program. He was also awarded an Alfred P. Sloan Indigenous Graduate Program (SIGP) Fellowship and a National Academy of Sciences Ford Foundation Dissertation Fellowship. After spending several years as a master’s degree prepared science instructor in the tribal college system and upon completing his PhD, Dr. Ceballos spent over a decade providing international research opportunities to student from historically underrepresented groups in science and developed a robust individual research program studying extremophile microbes and their viruses, eukaryotic viruses (e.g., herpesviruses), bacteriophage (e.g., cyanophage) as well as developing microbial-based biotechnology. He has authored/co-authored over twenty peer-reviewed journal articles, published a single-author book, and serves as inventor of record on a recent patent focused on the development of thermotolerant mobile enzyme sequestration platforms for biofuels (i.e., cellulosic ethanol) production and agricultural applications (i.e., nanobiotics for poultry feed).