Professor Ananias A. Escalante graduated as a biologist at Universidad Simón Bolivar in Venezuela, where he also got his MSc in Ecology. He earned his Ph.D. in Biology at the University of California Irvine in 1995. Dr. Escalante then joined the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta (CDC) as a postdoctoral fellow and was affiliated as a guest researcher in the CDC until 2005, when he joined Arizona State University as Associate Professor. Since 2015, Dr. Escalante has been part of Temple University in Philadelphia as core faculty of the Institute for Genomics and Evolutionary Medicine (iGEM). His research has centered on translating concepts from population genetics into epidemiology, particularly understanding the dispersion of mutations associated with drug resistance in Plasmodium falciparum and how molecular population genetics can enrich surveillance to inform malaria control and elimination programs. He has worked on deepening our understanding of malarial parasites' diversity using evolutionary genetics; those investigations include phylogenetic and comparative genomic studies in Plasmodium species found in nonhuman primates as they relate to the origins of human malaria parasites.