Dr. Christian Reidys is a Professor at the Biocomplexity Institute and Initiative at the University of Virginia and Professor of Mathematics. His areas of expertise and research interests are discrete mathematics; computational biology; molecular evolution, structure, prediction, and evolution of RNA, DNA combinatorics, and topology of large data sets. Dr. Reidys began his career at Los Alamos National Laboratory and held positions at prominent universities in the United States, Europe, and Asia. Prior to his current post at UVA, he was Director and Professor at the Biocomplexity Institute at Virginia Tech; Professor of Mathematics at the University of Southern Denmark; Deputy Director of the Center for Combinatorics, LMPC, and Professor for Mathematics at Nankai University, located in Tianjin, China; and Staff Member and Postdoctoral Fellow at Los Alamos National Laboratory. He has published nearly 100 papers on a variety of topics ranging from Bioinformatics, Physics and Mathematical Biology to Pure Mathematics. He conceptualized neutral networks of RNA as random graphs, introduced sequential dynamical systems for large systems simulations, k-noncrossing RNA structures, and studied topological filtrations of RNA structures.  Dr. Reidys is the author of two books, Combinatorial and Computational Biology of Pseudoknot RNA and An Introduction to Sequential Dynamical Systems. In 2008, Dr. Reidys was awarded the Lee Segel Prize by the Society for Mathematical Biology in honor of outstanding contributions to the field of mathematical biology. In 2009, he was awarded the Changjiang Scholar Award, the highest academic award issued to an individual in higher education by the Ministry of Education of The People’s Republic of China.