Filipe Castro is a researcher at História, Territórios e Comunidades, in the Center for Functional Ecology, University of Coimbra. From 2001 to 2021 he was the Frederick R. Mayer II Professor of Anthropology at Texas A&M University and the Director of the J. Richard Steffy Ship Reconstructing Laboratory. He concluded his civil engineering degree in 1984 and a post-graduation in recuperation of old buildings and monuments in 1986. He worked as a civil engineer until the early 1990s, when he moved into management, working for the Portuguese government and completing an MBA in 1994. In 1995 he became manager at Centro Nacional de Arqueologia Náutica e Subaquática (CNANS), the Portuguese state agency for nautical archaeology. This work eventually led him to leave his managing career in 1998 and enroll in the Nautical Archaeology Program at Texas A&M University, where he finished his PhD in 2001 and started teaching as invited professor. In 2002 he was hired as assistant professor with an endowed chair, in 2008 he was promoted to associate professor and in 2012 to full professor. His main research interests cluster around early modern European seafaring and history of shipbuilding. He has conducted fieldwork in Brazil, Panama, Puerto Rico, Portugal, Spain, Italy and Croatia. He is the author of the books A Nau de Portugal (2003) and the Pepper Wreck, A Portuguese Indiaman at the Mouth of the Tagus River (2005), and co-editor of Heritage at Sea (2022), with Ana Crespo and Nigel Nayling, Edge of Empire, Proceedings of the Symposium held at 2006 SHA Annual Meeting (2008), with Katie Custer, and ACUA Underwater Archaeology Proceedings of the 2011 Annual Meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology (2011), with Lindsey Thomas.