Son of Jewish immigrants from Edinet, Bessarabia. He is a member both of the Brazilian Academy ofSciences and the Academy of Sciences for the Developing World (Trieste, Italy). Aron Simis is a full professor at the Universidade Federal de Pernambuco, Brazil, and Class A research scholarship recipient from the Brazilian Research Council. He earned his PhD from Queen's University, Canada. He has previously held a full professorship at IMPA (Instituto de Matemática Pura e Applicada) in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. He was president of the Brazilian Mathematical Society and member on several occasions of international commissions of the IMU (International Mathematical Union) and TWAS (Academy of Sciences for the Developing World). He has been director of three workshops in his field at the ICTP (Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics). In Brazil he is a recipient of the National Medal for Scientific Merit at the order of Grā-Cruz and a member of the Brazilian Research Group in Commutative Algebra and Algebraic Geometry (1997- 2007). His main research interests in mathematics include: main structures in commu- tative algebra; projective varieties in algebraic geometry; aspects of algebraic combina- torics; special graded algebras; foundations of Rees algebras; cremona and birational maps; algebraic vector fields; differential methods.