Salwa El-Shawan Castelo-Branco, who earned her PhD in Ethnomusicology at Columbia University, is President of the International Council for Traditional Music (ICTM) and Professor Emerita of Ethnomusicology at the Universidade Nova de Lisboa (UNL) in Portugal. She is founder and former director of the Institute for Ethnomusicology – Center for Studies in Music and Dance at the same university (1995 – 2020). She was Vice-President of the Society for Ethnomusicology and the ICTM, and Vice Chancellor of the UNL. She was assistant professor at New York University (1979 – 1982), visiting professor at the Universities of Columbia, Princeton, Chicago and California (Berkeley) in the US; and visiting scholar at Cambridge University (UK). She received the Glarean Award of the Swiss Musicological Society (2013). Her publications include: Transforming Ethnomusicology, 2 vols (ed.) with Beverely Diamond (2021); Portugal and Spain: Experiencing Music, Expressing Culture, with Susana Moreno Fernández (2019); Enciclopédia da Música em Portugal no Século XX 4 volumes (ed.) (2010).