I am marine microbial ecologist interested in understanding the structure of marine eukaryotic phytoplankton communities and how environmental factors shape their diversity. They are the core of globally important cycles such as carbon and oxygen and understand the factors that control and maintain their diversity and the structure of their communities, is fundamental to understand our planet. My work combined traditional culture isolation and laboratory studies along with cutting-edge DNA sequencing approaches to elucidate the patterns of marine eukaryotic phytoplankton communities across a wide range of environments.

From the Federal university of Rio de Janeiro, I received a bachelor’s degree in Genetics and Molecular biology. Focused in pursuing an academic career, I enrolled in the master program and in a blink of an eye I was doing a PhD in environmental Microbiology. During my PhD, I was awarded with a government scholarship that allowed me to spend an year at University of Michigan in Dr. James Tiedje laboratory. There, I had the opportunity to discover the potential of high throughput sequencing technologies to investigate the microbial diversity in different environments. When I graduated, I was fascinated by the microbial world and had just heard about an immense diversity of organisms and viruses at the sea. It was the moment to shift my career towards to marine ecosystems. I first started as a junior postdoctoral research fellow at the Oceanographic Institute at the University of São Paulo (Brazil) time I participated in two international marine microbial ecology courses (ECODIM – Chile and CMORE – Hawaii). By 2012 I moved to France, where I worked for the 5 years at the Station Biologique in Roscoff, France, focusing on oceanic microalgae, connecting large scale molecular biology data sets from the marine environment with classical methods such as isolation and cultivation of marine phytoplankton. I left Roscoff in late 2017, to take my new position at the Nanyang Technological University where I am currently working and pursuing new wonders of the phytoplankton world.