René Villalobos is an associate professor in the Department of Industrial Engineering in the Ira A. Fulton School of Engineering at ASU. Villalobos received his B.S. in Industrial-Mechanical Engineering at the Chihuahua Technological Institute in Mexico in 1982. He received his M.S. in Industrial Engineering at the University of Texas at El Paso in 1987 and his Ph.D. in Industrial Engineering at Texas A & M University in 1991.

Villalobos came to ASU in 1999 from the Mechanical and Industrial Engineering Department at the University of Texas at El Paso where he had been serving as an associate professor. Other positions he held at the University of Texas at El Paso included the Graduate Advisor for Manufacturing Engineering and the Director for the Center for Electronics Manufacturing.

Prior to academia, Villalobos served as an industrial engineer for Packard Electric and a project engineer for Renault Company. He has served as a consultant for Thomson Consumer Electronics, SL Waber, El Paso Foreign Trade Association, Diesel Recon, White-Rodgers, TRW and Lear.

Villalobos has been an Institute for Industrial Engineering's (IIE) Doctoral Dissertation Award recipient and a National Science Foundation Early Career Development Program (CAREER) Grant recipient. He is a member of Alpha Pi Mu, IIE, the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Science, the American Society for Engineering Education, the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers and the Society of Manufacturing Engineers.