I am a biologist focused on behavioral ecology and animal communication. I use the careful perspective of natural history to gather essential information about study models and then design hypothesis-based studies. I like to say that I'm a field biologist born in natural history and community ecology, but raised and trained in behavioral ecology. That's because when in the undergraduate course in Biology in the University of the Region of Chapecó, I started my journey into research studying the diversity of ants in urban areas and the diversity of frogs in forests. Research grants were available for those projects and, as a young student, I just went for it - and luckily I won. Soon enough, however, I found myself interested more in animal behavior than in community ecology, specially in animal communication because of my fellow friends, the frogs. I finished the research projects on ant and frog diversity, but as I wished to explore animal behavior, I moved to another town to do my master's and my PhD.

I am the first in my family to earn an undergraduate and a graduate degree. I obtained a master's and a PhD in Animal Biodiversity from the Federal University of Santa Maria, Brazil, working under the supervision of Dr. Sonia Zanini Cechin. During my PhD I investigated the communication and reproductive investment in a diurnal, stream-breeding frog, merging observations and experiments with analysis of museum specimens. In my master's and PhD years I could finally dive into animal communication research, and that was a period of profound learning and training in animal communication theory and statistics. 

I keep studying animal communication nowadays, but with an interesting plot twist since I finished my PhD: from simple acoustic playbacks and video recordings of behaviors my subsequent research got a pinch of robotics on it. That's because the complexity of the communication in the study system that I was studying forced me to search novel ways to explore experimentally multimodal signal function. Moreover, a major professional decision that I reached when completing my PhD was that the evolution of multimodal communication in the context of sexual selection would be my main focus of research. Then, the robot-frog was born, and so my post-doctoral research at the University of São Paulo.

After finishing my PhD I was hired as a postdoc at the Department of Ecology at University of São Paulo, with funding from the prestigious Research Funding Agency of the State of São Paulo (FAPESP), to execute the project “Function of multimodal displays and the effect of environmental factors on the reproductive success of a neotropical frog”. I moved 1.250 km, from a small city to a megalopolis, to work with prominent behavioral ecologist Dr. Glauco Machado for three years. Together, we investigated the function of multimodal signals on male contests, and the effects of noise and body condition on the response of female to unimodal and multimodal signals. To do so, I built, in collaboration with Dr. Maurício Beux from Federal University of Santa Maria, an innovative electromechanical robot that emits acoustic, visual, and multimodal stimuli (and I had a lot of fun in the field experiments with it).

Since the beginning of 2021, I supervise research and teach population ecology, community ecology and vertebrate zoology at a State university in southern Brazil, the State University of Ponta Grossa.