I am a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Pierce Lab at the Dept. Organismic & Evolutionary Biology/Museum of Comparative Zoology (OEB/MCZ), Harvard University, where I develop and apply new methods in phylogenetic and macroevolutionary inference to understand the drivers of phenotypic and molecular diversity in reptiles, as well as the major drivers of phenotypic radiation and diversification in early tetrapods.

Historical background

I started my career in my home city (Rio de Janeiro, Brazil), where I obtained my BSc and MSc in Biological Sciences-Zoology at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro with Dr. Alexander Kellner , and began conducting research on fossil reptiles at the National Museum of Brazil. I subsequently moved to Canada to pursue my PhD (concluded in 2018) with Dr. Michael Caldwell at the University of Alberta to shed light on the century-old problem of the origin of squamates (lizards and snakes) using new phylogenetic tools and combining morphological and molecular data. In late 2018, the key paper stemming from my PhD thesis, where we bridged the gap between molecular and morphological hypotheses of early squamate evolution, was featured on the cover of the journal Nature. In 2018, I was awarded the first Alexander Agassiz Fellowship from the OEB/MCZ at Harvard University to expand my research to a broader set of questions in vertebrate evolution, and since, 2021 I have continued to work in the OEB/MCZ as a NSERC(Canada) Postdoctoral Fellow. Since 2022, I am also a Research Associate in the Division of Vertebrate Zoology at the American Museum of Natural History.