William Fagan is a Distinguished University Professor in, and past Chair of, the Department of Biology. He received his Ph.D. in Zoology from the University of Washington (1996) and was a postdoctoral fellow at the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis. His research, which emphasizes the interplay between data and theory, sits at the interface of mathematics and biology. He is an elected Fellow of both the Ecological Society of America and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He has received a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Presidential Award of the American Society of Naturalists. He has authored over 285 journal articles which have collectively garnered ~38,000 citations and has twice had the cover of the journal Science for his research on animal movement ecology. Currently, his externally funded research focuses on mathematical investigations of migration and other long-distance animal movements and the spread of disease.