I am a Postdoctoral Investigator in the Biology Department at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution working with Heidi Sosik and Michael Neubert. Prior to this position, I worked as a Postdoctoral Scholar at UC Santa Cruz with Stephan Munch and Eric Palkovacs. I obtained a PhD degree in Civil and Environmental Engineering from MIT under the supervision of Serguei Saavedra. I am originally from Brazil, where I obtained a Master’s degree in Ecology from the University of São Paulo under the supervision of Paulo R. Guimarães Jr. as well as Bachelor’s degrees in Biology and in Applied Mathematics. For more information, please see my CV.

The main focus of my research is to understand and predict how ecological communities of interacting species respond to natural and human-driven perturbations. To do so, I develop approaches based on population dynamics models, dynamical systems theory, nonlinear time-series analysis, and machine learning to unravel how communities may respond to disturbances such as warming, heatwaves, storms, pollution, or overfishing. I am particularly interested in mathematical and computational approaches that allow us to anticipate how a community might respond to future disturbances by learning about its dynamical behavior from past empirical data. I am currently applying these data-driven approaches to marine ecosystems, such as the planktonic communities extensively monitored through the Northeast US Shelf Long-Term Ecological Research project (NES-LTER). In addition to this main line of research, I am also very interested in several related topics that include: (1) the causes and consequences of non-equilibrium (e.g., cycles, chaos) population dynamics, (2) structural stability approaches to understand changes in community composition over time, and (3) nonlinear time-series approaches to forecast and manage harvested populations. Check out the Research and Publications tabs or get in touch if you would like to know more about my research!