Lin Chao is a Chinese Brazilian American evolutionary biologist and geneticist. Chao gained his PhD in 1977 from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, as a student of Bruce R. Levin (now at Emory University), and was a NIH postdoctoral fellow at Princeton University in the laboratory of Edward C. Cox. He spent most of his career in the Department of Biology of the University of Maryland, College Park and is currently at the Ecology, Behavior and Evolution Section of the University of California, San Diego. * UCSD Chancellor's Associates Faculty Excellence Award (2014)