User Portlet

I am a SIMONS-FAPESP Assistant Professor in Biological Physics at the ICTP-South American Institute for Fundamental Research (São Paulo, Brazil) and a SIMONS Associate at the Quantitative Life Science section at the Abdus Salam ICTP (Trieste, Italy).

Previously, I was a Life Sciences Research Foundation postdoctoral fellow at the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Princeton University, where I investigated the interplay between the ecology, evolution and self-organized multicellularity of microbial communities. This work was conducted in close collaboration with experimental groups, using the social amoeba Dictyostelium discoideum and the biofilm-forming bacterium Vibirio cholerae as model organisms.

Before this, I obtained my Ph.D. in Physics at Institute for Cross Disciplinary Physics and Complex Systems (IFISC) in Palma de Mallorca (Spain). My dissertation was a highly interdisciplinary work, in the interface between ecology, physics, and computer sciences. Through a combination of mathematical modeling and data analysis, I studied how information sharing during collective foraging may result in the emergence of self-organized groups; how long-range competition can result in self-organized vegetation patterns in semiarid landscapes; as well as the effect of environmental noise on the persistence and stability of ecological communities.