I am curator at the Finnish Museum of Natural History Luomus and adjunct professor in Ecology at the University of Helsinki. While heading the Laboratory for Integrative Biodiversity Research (LIBRe), I am currently mostly interested in understanding global drivers of extinction and the distribution of species and communities across space and time. To reach such goals I am also developing new statistical and computational tools to quantify extinction risk and biodiversity at all levels: taxonomic, phylogenetic, and functional.
I have finished a postoctoral project in Instituto Butantan (Brazil) about the diversity of mygalomorph spiders in a Brazilian biome and received a Ph.D. degree in Zoology from the University of São Paulo (USP), Brazil, studying taxonomy and systematics of tarantulas. I have been working with evolution, taxonomy, ecology, natural history and behavior of arachnids since I was an undergrad student. My research interests since I became part of LIBRe are related to the trade of live tarantulas and scorpions through social media and its impact on wild populations as well as the inclusion of some tarantula species on the Red List of Threatened Species. I am supported by Kone Foundation.
I am a PhD student, coming to Finland from 2020 to 2024 supported by Kone Foundation. I will work on the automation of extinction risk assessments according to the IUCN criteria. In the meanwhile I will have to learn deep neural networks and other cool stuff. (ResearchGate)
I am a current PhD student at Georgetown University in Washington, DC, working in the Ries Lab of Butterfly Informatics on a project involving a global butterfly database, ButterflyNet. Will soon join LIBRe (part of the time while based on the US) for a postdoc project on morphological traits, ontology development, and macroecological questions involving butterflies as a primary study organism. (Research Gate – Google Scholar)