Maria Cristina Villalobos

Villalobos was born in McAllen, Texas and grew up in Donna, Texas, both in the Rio Grande Valley, the oldest of three children of two immigrants from Mexico, and the first in her family with a college education. After participating in engineering programs at the University of Texas–Pan American as a high school student, she did her undergraduate studies in mathematics at the University of Texas at Austin, also including summer research programs at Rice University, the University of California, Berkeley, and the Sandia National Laboratories.

She went to Rice University for graduate study in mathematics, and completed her doctorate there in 2000. Her dissertation, The Behavior of Newton's Method on Two Equivalent Systems from Linear and Nonlinear Programming, was supervised by Richard A. Tapia.

She became a faculty member in mathematics at the University of Texas–Pan American in 2001; the university merged with the University of Texas at Brownsville creating the present University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, where she continues to work. In 2019 she was named associate dean for strategic initiatives and institutional effectiveness.