Carlos is currently an assistant professor in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at University of Massachusetts -- Amherst (UMass Amherst). He was previously a Lindsay Visiting Assistant Research Professor (postdoctoral researcher) in the Department of Statistics at Pennsylvania State University. There he worked with Aleksandra (Sesa) Slavkovic and Matthew Reimherr to develop methods at the intersection of differential privacy and statistical shape analysis.

In 2020 Carlos received his PhD, and an MS in 2018, in biostatistics from Florida State University under the supervision of Anuj Srivastava where he investigated the shape and structural properties of chromosomes and proteins. There he was introduced to shape analysis which is an area of research somewhere between differential geometry and statistics.

Even further back, in 2015 he received an MS in mathematics at University of Wisconsin -- Milwaukee under the supervision of Jay Beder. His academic career started at Ripon College where received a BA in mathematics in 2011. At the time, and at time of writing this, Ripon did not offer a statistics degree, so there he did the equivalent of a double major in mathematics and statistics.

Carlos J. Soto grew up in Chicago, the city that never sleeps. The pandemic has changed his non-academic interests greatly, but in general he is interested in rock climbing, lifting, comedy, gaming, and music (partial to guitar from 1970's to 1990's). He has played guitar, on and off, for nearly 20 years after having learned at the Chicago Old Town School of Folk. He has rock climbed in a few states (Alabama, Georgia, Kentucky, Tennessee, Massachusetts, Illinois, Wisconsin, Colorado) and hopes to continue to explore crags across the country (5.10 outdoor/5.11 indoor, V5 climber). Even though he'd never admit it, Carlos likes to write poetry. His favorite authors include Kurt Vonnegut, Neil Gaiman, and Manfredo P. Do Carmo.