Rosental Calmon Alves is a professor of journalism at the University of Texas at Austin, where he holds the Knight Chair in Journalism and the UNESCO Chair in Communication and is also the founder and director of the Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas.

Created in 2002, the center has benefited thousands of journalists around the world with training programs. The center launched in 2012 the first program of MOOCs (massive open online courses) specializing in journalism training. In the first 18 months of the program, eight MOOCs reached 35,000 people from 160 countries. In Latin America and the Caribbean, the center has helped journalists to create a new generation of organizations dedicated to elevating the professional and ethical standards of journalism in their countries.

He moved to the United States in 1996, after a 27-year career as journalist in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, mostly with the newspaper Jornal do Brasil, where he worked as a reporter, foreigncorrespondent and executive editor.

In 1995, he launched the first edition of a Brazilian newspaper on the Internet, and at the University of Texas he launched in 1997 a course on online journalism. Since 2011, he also teaches Entrepreneurial Journalism, a class dedicated to media innovation, startups and project management.

Alves is also the founder and director of the International Symposium on Online Journalism (ISOJ), a global conference he has hosted in Austin, Texas, since 1999. He has worked as a consultant for media companies in Latin America and Europe, advising them on digital media strategies. He is also a member of the board of several international organizations, including WAN-IFRA's Latin American Committee.