SHORT BIO
I was born and raised in São Mateus, a coastal city in the north of Espírito Santo state, Brazil. Despite growing up in close contact with Nature (or with what was left of it), I don't recall any particular curiosity for nature that seems to flourish within many people who decided to become biologists later. But that changed when my family and I moved to Ariquemes (Rondônia state), a small city in the north of Brazil, situated on the border between the Amazon rainforest and the cerrado, a type of tropical savanna. I enrolled at the Universidade Federal de Rondônia as a biology student when I was 17. Being quite young at the time, I had the notion that I could change paths if I realized that biology wasn't the right fit for me. However, that never happened. During my first semester at the university, I secured an internship at a lab focusing on fish ecology and local fisheries. I fell in love with it instantly. I had the opportunity to venture into the field, experience the true wonders of nature in the Guaporé River and Madeira River, and it was truly fantastic. I equally loved being in the lab. It was like a refuge, and I would spend any spare moment there. By the end of my first year as a bachelor's student, I realized that I could turn this passion into a career, and that's precisely what I've been doing ever since. After I got my bachelor's degree (2006), I moved to the heart of the Amazon Rainforest, Manaus (Amazonas state), to join the Instituto Nacional de Pesquisas da Amazônia (INPA), where I got a master's degree (2009); moved back to Porto Velho to work for a private company, where I led a large inventory of the fish fauna of the Madeira River (a tributary of the Amazon River) (2009–2010); took a sabbatical in France, where I lived with a local family in the Alps as au pair (2011–2012); moved to Switzerland for an internship at the University of Geneva (2012–2013); stayed there until I got my PhD degree (2019); was unemployed for a couple of months; almost moved to Oklahoma (USA) for a postdoc, but Covid didn’t allow me to; so, started a postdoc at Eawag/University of Bern (2020), where I worked for three years. Switzerland has been home for more than a decade now. However, since September 2023, I've been managing a dual-location work arrangement between Switzerland and the Netherlands. My current postdoc is funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation's Postdoc Mobility program, and my primary hosts are Dutch institutions—Naturalis Biodiversity Center and the University of Groningen. Therefore, I travel regularly from/to Switzerland/Netherlands, which allows me to closely work with my collaborators based in both Swiss (Eawag, the University of Bern, and the Natural History Museum of Bern.) and Dutch institutions. |
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