Alejandro Adem, CEO and Scientific Director, Mitacs, and Canada Research Chair in Algebraic Topology at the University of British Columbia, received his PhD from Princeton University in 1986. He has held visiting positions at Stanford University, the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, ETH-Zurich, the Max Planck Institute in Bonn, the University of Paris VII and XIII, and at Princeton University. Alejandro was on the faculty at the University of Wisconsin from 1989 to 2004 and served as Chair of the Department of Mathematics during the period 1999-2002. He joined the faculty of the University of British Columbia in 2004 and served as Director of the Pacific Institute for the Mathematical Sciences during the period 2008-2015. He was awarded an NSF Young Investigator Award in 1992, a Romnes Faculty Fellowship in 1995, a Vilas Associate Award in 2003 and the Canadian Mathematical Society’s Jeffrey-Williams Prize for research in 2015. He was an inaugural Fellow of the American Mathematical Society (2012) and has been Managing Editor of the Transactions & Memoirs of the American Mathematical Society since 2013.