Alan S. Perelson received B.S. degrees in Life Sciences and in Electrical Engineering & Computer Science from MIT in 1967, and a Ph.D. in Biophysics from UC Berkeley in 1972. He has been an Acting Assistant Professor of Medical Physics at UC Berkeley, an Assistant Professor of Medical Sciences at Brown University, a staff member, Fellow and then Group Leader of the Theoretical Biology and Biophysics Group at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL). He is now one of five Senior Fellows at LANL as well an external professor at the Santa Fe Institute. He is also an adjunct professor of Bioinformatics at Boston University, of Biostatistics and Computational Biology at the University of Rochester Medical School and of Biology at the University of New Mexico. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) and the American Physical Society (APS) and the recipient of an NIH MERIT Award and the APS 2017 Max Delbruck Award in Biological Physics. He has made fundamental contributions to the understanding of how the immune system protects us from disease. His work also elucidated many features of HIV infection including the need to treat the infection with combination therapy, and established basic principles that led to the new cures for hepatitis C infection.