I obtained my B.S. degree in Biology at the Universidade Federal de Pelotas, in which I conducted two years of fieldwork to understand more about the habitat use and diet of Cerdocyon thous and Lycalopex gymnocercus to investigate how these two sympatric species of canids managed to coexist in the same forest.
 
     In order to understand more about carnivores, I moved to the Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS), where I took my master's degree on the trait evolution of the Canidae family. At some point, I saw myself interested in species' distribution patterns and what are the forces that shape them. I stayed at UFRGS to do my Ph.D., seeking to understand the distribution of the Canidae family in the past, present, and future. Some of the questions that I wanted to answer were: Where did canid lineages originate and how did they spread across the planet over the last 12 million years? What are the biotic and abiotic factors that shape the distribution of canids today? How will canids cope with climate change over the next 70 years? Throughout my thesis, I had the opportunity to do a double degree in the Netherlands with Dr. Rampal Etienne, in which we applied state-dependent speciation and extinction models to understand whether the entrance into new continents hinders or fosters Canidae diversification rates.

     In 2022 I started a postdoctoral position at USP in Brazil. My goal is to explore patterns of competition among extinct lineages of carnivores and understand how it affected their diversification rates over time. 

      I am interested in very broad issues that can be addressed in different biological groups and on different scales of time and space.