SCIENCE sciencemag.org 22 MAY 2020 • VOL 368 ISSUE 6493 817wanting to lower academic standards and
dilute the quality of the program.”ONE FORMER STUDENT, Anarina Murillo,
says Castillo-Chavez gave her the courage
to pursue a career she thought was beyond
her grasp.
“Carlos could tell that I suffered from
imposter syndrome,” Murillo says, referring
to the feeling of many minority students
that they don’t belong and that their short-
comings will be exposed. “So, he told me to
look in the mirror and say, ‘I’m going to get
a math Ph.D.’ He told me to say it over and
over until I believed it.”
Murillo was a junior at ASU when she ap-
plied for and was accepted into MTBI. “And
that’s when I fell in love with mathematical
modeling,” she says.
Her academic career took off from there.
She earned a Bachelor of Science in 2010
and then ripped through the AMLSS gradu-
ate program. After doing a postdoc at the
University of Alabama, Birmingham, she ac-
cepted Castillo-Chavez’s invitation last year
to join him at Brown University. Within
months she was hired as an assistant pro-
fessor in Brown’s School of Public Health,
where she applies her math background to
the design of clinical pediatric studies.
“I always knew that I wanted to be a pro-
fessor,” she says. “But I never expected it
to happen.”
Maria Martinez hoped Castillo-Chavez
might do the same thing for her academic
career, which was in crisis.
In 2011, Martinez was sexually assaulted
shortly after starting a Ph.D. program at the
University of California (UC), Berkeley. The
injuries she suffered eventually required five
surgeries and the use of a wheelchair for
18 months. The experience also led her to
rethink her decision to pursue a degree in
theoretical math.
Martinez says she was moved by
Castillo-Chavez’s passion for helping mi-
nority students when she heard him speak
at a Latinx in the Mathematics Sciences
conference in Los Angeles in March 2018.
And she thought AMLSS was an ideal set-
ting to pursue her newfound interest in the
evolution of societal attitudes toward vio-
lence against women.
“This is exactly what I needed,” Martinez
remembers saying to herself. “The whole idea
behind his program is to apply mathemat-
ics to problems in the social sciences. I also
needed somebody who would believe in me.”
Martinez says Castillo-Chavez promised
her generous funding and “a safe space to
learn and work.” But her hopes for a brighter
future faded quickly after she arrived in Au-
gust 2018.
In one case, she says, Castillo-Chavez “be-came very agitated” and berated her for
talking to a reporter who wanted to write
about her experience at UC Berkeley. (No
story ever appeared.) He repeatedly cited
her ongoing medical issues in conversa-
tions about her academic status, she adds.
Castillo-Chavez also threatened to renege
on a promise to bring her to Brown, she
says, “because you’ve been sick so often.”
Martinez says Castillo-Chavez ques-
tioned her commitment to the program
and her ability to complete her degree.
After denying her request to miss 2 days
to attend her brother’s medical schoolgraduation, she says he told her she was
“a bad student, ... not good at research, ...
undisciplined, and a troublemaker.” In her
23 April 2019 complaint to Crow, Martinez
wrote, “Dr. Castillo ... created an environ-
ment so tense that I am scared to say any-
thing to anyone.”ASU OFFICIALS DECLINED to discuss any
aspect of their investigation. But emails
Martinez provided describe how the uni-
versity’s associate general counsel, Becky
Herbst, sought her approval for an “infor-
mal” resolution of her complaint in which
Castillo-Chavez would agree to step down
from his leadership positions and retire.
The findings of the investigation were
never made public. Martinez accepted that
solution, she says, because “he could have
hurt so many other people if he remained.”
The fate of the empire Castillo-Chavez
built is “under review,” says Patrick Kenney,dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sci-
ences. “No decisions have been made regard-
ing how we will move forward next year and
beyond,” Kenney said earlier this month.
Castillo-Chavez, who has applied for
emeritus status, will not have a say in
those decisions. But he is worried about
what might happen.
“The future of everything I have created
is uncertain,” he says. “I’m not sure there’s
anybody else who would be willing to do
what I’ve had to do to keep it going.” As one
faculty member who has clashed with him
puts it, “a center without Carlos is not some-thing that anybody has ever considered.”
The future is equally murky for Martinez,
who last year moved back to her hometown
of Los Angeles after finding another adviser
from a different ASU department. “I’d like
to teach math at a community college in the
Los Angeles area if campuses reopen in the
fall,” she says, noting that she’ll be taking a
leave of absence at the end of this semester
to weigh her options. It would be a way to
give others the chance at a quality education
that her parents, who were factory workers,
were denied.
However, she doesn’t know whether
she’ll ever finish her dissertation and earn
a Ph.D. “I want to be a mathematician,”
she says. “But after my experience with Dr.
Castillo-Chavez, I don’t know if I can.” jMolly Stellino graduated from Arizona State
University, Phoenix, this month and served as
PHOTO: MATT LE editor of The State Press Magazine.
Carlos Castillo-Chavez (center) with students from his undergraduate summer research program.Published by AAAS