ABOUT
Born and raised in São Carlos, SP, Brazil. My interest in studying science, particularly environmental science, started when I was 15 years old and received a fellowship from the Brazilian National Counsel of Technological and Scientific Development (CNPq) to work on a project studying the impact of farm fishes on water quality in Central São Paulo State, Brazil. This project was led by Dr. José Galizia Tundisi at the International Institute of Ecology, São Carlos, Brazil. During the initial period of the project, I started reading academic papers on water quality and was fascinated by the subject, mainly the problem of eutrophication. Upon my request, Dr. Tundisi graciously allowed me to conduct my own research parallel to the project. One of my secondary research projects involved study of eutrophication on urban reservoirs by analyzing a time-series data of Nitrogen and Phosphorus in several tropical urban reservoirs in Brazil. This work helped me win several awards (please refer to CV) in Brazil and was presented in the International Conference of Young Scientists (ICYS) at Katowice, Poland in 2005. Another study was on analyzing the absorption of zinc by aquatic macrophytes mainly Eichhornia crassipes and Pistia stratiotes. I presented this research and won the 3rd place in Environmental Sciences Category at ICYS at Stuttgart, Germany in 2006 and I also presented this work at Intel International Science and Engineering Fair (Intel ISEF) at Albuquerque, NM, USA in 2007. My third project was on using a constructed wetland system to purify water, which won several prizes in national events, and also a 2nd prize on ICYS at St. Petersburg, Russia in 2007 and a 3rd prize at International Sustainable World (Energy, Engineering, and Environment) Project Olympiad (I-SWEEEP) in Houston, TX, USA in 2009.
During my undergraduate studies in BSC in Geography, at São Paulo State University (UNESP), Campus at Rio Claro, SP, Brazil. I managed to keep working on limnology and water quality and linking the results to climatology. During college, I participated in several scientific projects in which I could develop the skills of Geographical Climatology. I also joined the extension project "Cursinho ATHo" in which I voluntarily taught Portuguese (literature, grammar and writing skills) to low income people. For my graduate thesis entitled "Study of climatic dynamics and its influence on the water quality from urban reservoirs"; I used a weather-type classification based on satellite images, meteorological time-series data, and barometric maps to correlate the changing on weather types to toxic cyanobacteria cell counts. There is a strong influence of the external forces originated from changing weather types on water column stability processes such as stratification and mixing and hence on water quality and toxic cyanobacteria blooms. This work was funded by a FAPESP (The São Paulo Research Foundation) Scientific Iniciation Fellowship and conducted under the advisory of Dr. João A. Zavattini and Dr. José G. Tundisi. After the completion of my classes, I got a BSc in Geography with honors (Outstanding Academic Achievement and CREA-SP Professional Graduation Award).
I got my MSc Degree in Remote Sensing at the National Institute for Space Research (INPE), São José dos Campos, Brazil with a CAPES (Coordination for the Improvement of Higher Education Personnel) fellowship. I chose very specific technical courses in order to expand my knowledge and learn the advanced tools and techniques mainly in the field of remote sensing and its application to limnology. In my Master thesis entitled “Re-parameterization of a quasi analytical algorithm and phycocyanin estimation for a tropical reservoir”, I developed bio-optical model to estimate cyanobacteria content from remotely sensed images. My study site is Funil reservoir, which drains water from “Vale do Paraíba” region, one of the most important industrial areas in Brazil, sharing borders with three states, Minas Gerais, Rio de Janeiro, and São Paulo. This reservoir have been frequently affected by the occurrence of cyanobacteria blooms mainly due to the increasing availability of nutrients but also due to the recent warming trends. The timeliness and importance of this research is justified due to the recent alarming trend of rapid increases of cyanobacterial blooms in tropical reservoirs.
I got my PhD at the Department of Earth Sciences from the Indiana University - Purdue University at Indianapolis (IUPUI), Indianapolis, IN, USA, under the advisory of Dr. Lin Li. My PhD research was about the improvement of the retrieval of blue-green algae information in inland waters.
I am currently a postdoctoral researcher at the Leibniz-Institute of Freshwater Ecology and Inland Fisheries.
Check out my story at the IUPUI Graduate Office page here.
Check out my IGB's profile here.