Joseph M. Calvo is the William T. Keeton Professor of Biology and currently a faculty member in the Department of Molecular Biology and Genetics.

Calvo received a B.A. degree from Whitman College, Walla Walla, Washington, in 1956 and then studied at the University of Freiburg, West Germany as a Fulbright Scholar from 1956-57. He received a Ph.D. in Chemistry from Washington State University before he was appointed as a Research Associate at Cold Spring Harbor working with H. E. Umbarger. In 1964 he joined the Cornell faculty and became a full professor in 1979. Professor Calvo is a member of the American Society of Microbiology.

Professor Calvo taught biochemistry and molecular biology at both the graduate and undergraduate level, and for undergraduate students taught courses for both majors and non-majors. He was particularly interested in bringing the excitement of modern research to freshmen and for many years taught a course with that theme that was limited to freshmen. That freshmen are excited by research and research opportunities is evidenced by the fact that large numbers of them continue to turn up on Saturday mornings at the beginning of the spring term to hear Cornell faculty talk about their research within a non-credit "Orientation Lectures" course  that he established. Calvo was also interested in melding instruction in basic research with practical applications that stemmed from that research, as in the course that he most recently taught for senior biology majors "Application of Molecular Biology to Medicine, Agriculture and Industry". Since receiving the Keeton professorship in 1983, Calvo used his endowment to support a variety of projects relating to undergraduate education, including research opportunities for undergraduates, scholarship and renewal activities for Senior Lecturers, and mounting a new freshman course "Milestones in Molecular Biology."

Calvo has had a productive research career in the area of regulation of gene expression. His research was focused on leucine, one of the most abundant amino acids in protein; he   and his colleagues established the pathway by which leucine is synthesized in bacteria, and two mechanisms by which the amount of that synthesis is regulated (end-product inhibition and control of enzyme synthesis by translation-coupled attenuation). In addition, he and his co-workers discovered Lrp (leucine-responsive regulatory protein), a global regulator of metabolism in bacteria. His research program, funded for decades  by the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health (NIH), produced some 95 papers and scholarly reviews. He served on the editorial boards of the Journal of Bacteriology and of Nucleic Acids Research and ad hoc grant review panels for the NIH.

Calvo focused a great deal of his energy on Cornell's undergraduate students, serving for many years as the Director of Undergraduate Studies for programs of study in Biochemistry and in Molecular and Cell Biology and as chairman of the department's curriculum committee. Outside the department, he served as University Ombudsman from 1989-1991 and was a member of the Cornell University Board of Trustees from 1992-1996.

Calvo stands out especially for his commitment and contributions to undergraduate biology instruction. In 1971, he spent a sabbatical leave developing a new approach to personalizing the teaching of biochemistry to large numbers of students.That experience led to one of the most popular courses in biology, the auto tutorial biochemistry course BioBM330. This course, a core component of the curriculum for biology majors, has provided biochemistry instruction to thousands of students since its inception in 1972. Each year, several hundred students continue to benefit from the unusual auto-tutorial format for learning the demanding subject matter of biochemistry. He was awarded the SUNY Chancellor's Award for Excellence in Teaching in 1979 largely because of this teaching innovation.

Joseph Calvo did research and taught at Cornell for 43 years. He lives in Ithaca, N.Y. with his wife Rita A. Calvo, PhD '69, herself a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Molecular Biology and Genetics. They have 3 children:  Rachel Miriam Prabhakar '92; Naomi Ann Calvo, MPA '98; and Sarah Calvo.