Francisco Castilho Alcaraz (aka Chico) was born on January 28th, 1953 in the city of Dracena, in the countryside of the State of São Paulo. He graduated in Physics at the Institute of Physics of the University of São Paulo (USP) in 1975, completed his master’s degree in 1977 with a dissertation on the De Haas-van Alphen effect at the former Instituto de Energia Atômica – IEA (currently IPEN) under the supervision of Prof. David Y. Kojima, and his doctorate at the São Carlos Institute of Physics (IFSC) – USP in 1980 with a thesis on lattice gauge models under the guidance of Prof. Dr. Roland Koberle. He held visiting positions at the Institute for Theoretical Physics at the University of California at Santa Barbara twice (1981–1983 and 1991–1992), at the Australian National University (1986–1987) and at the University of Bönn (1992–1993). In 1989 he became a full professor at the Physics Department at UFSCar, having transferred to the IFSC-USP in 2002.

Between 2001 and 2007 he was the coordinator of the field of Physics at the Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo – FAPESP (the São Paulo state research agency). He was also coordinator of the Graduate Course in Physics at the Federal University of São Carlos, UFSCar, from 1996 to 1998, chairman of the IFSC-USP Research Commission from 2002 to 2006, head of the Department of Physics and Materials Science at IFSC. /USP from 2006 to 2008 and again from 2012 to 2014, and is currently chairman of the IFSC/USP Library and Information Service Commission.

He was a member of the editorial boards of the Brazilian Journal of Physics (1991–2010) , Journal of Physics A: Mathematical and General (1998–2006) and Journal of Statistical Mechanics: Theoretical and Experimental (since 1998). He coordinated, together with H. Hilhorst (Paris-Sud) and Yakov Sinai (Princeton University), the “General Aspects of Statistical Physics” thematic committee of the XXXIV International Conference on Statistical Physics – Statphys 2010.

His areas of interest include the statistical mechanics of theoretical models, with forays into magnetism theory, strongly correlated systems, exact solutions, conformal invariance, finite-size scaling and, more recently, algebraic methods in non-equilibrium systems and quantum entanglement in condensed matter. Throughout his career he has supervised, so far, 9 master’s students and 7 doctoral students. He has published more than 140 scientific articles that have accumulated, according to the Web of Science database, more than 4200 citations, giving him an H index (of Hirsch) equal to 31.

Chico has co-organized the first, second, and third edition of the Brazilian School on Statistical Mechanics. This fourth edition comes together with a workshop to honor his accomplishments and to thank him for his contributions to the science and society.

His CV on the CNPq Lattes platform can be accessed through the link <http://lattes.cnpq.br/9538405812117662>.