My Scientific Roots

Rua da Aurora and Capibaribe River — Recife, Brazil

I was born and raised in Recife, Brazil. My family moved to Florida when I was 15, where I attended high school and college. As a Biology major at Florida State University, I worked in the lab of Dr. Walter Tschinkel studying the social biology of fire ants. After college, I flew to the Amazon Rainforest to intern at the Brazilian National Institute for Amazonian Research. I worked in the lab of Dr. José Alves-Gomes, a Brazilian ichthyologist, studying the neuroethology of weakly electric fish. Much like a bat uses sound for echolocation, weakly electric fish use electricity to form electro-sensory maps of their environment to navigate the murky waters of the Rio Negro. In addition, these weak electric discharges are also important for social communication, with distinct specie-specific and sex-specific waveforms.  I have been fascinated by the transmission of information through electrical signals ever since.

  • “Just before leaping off the boat and immersing chest-deep into the murky water of the Rio Negro in the heart of the Amazon Rainforest, I was warned by our guide to watch out for the monster. This is what locals have fittingly nicknamed the South American Electric Eel, a beast capable of generating a shock powerful enough to kill a horse. As I inched my way into a narrow river channel along with a team of biologists from the Brazilian National Institute of Amazonian Research, I carefully maneuvered a submerged electrode equipped with an audio amplifier along the muddy riverbed. We were hoping to hear what can only be described as the sound of a faltering lawnmower, low voltage electrical pulses generated from specialized cells of the Neotropical Knifefish”

From the Rainforest to NYC

At the end of my internship, I landed a position in the joint labs of Dr. Alex Dranovsky and Dr. David Leonardo, both at the time, Assistant Professors of Psychiatry at Columbia University. Under their mentorship, I worked on dissecting the impact of social environment onto adult hippocampal neurogenesis, and serotonin circuitry in stress and despair. As former trainees of Dr. Rene Hen, we interacted closely with his group. In this vibrant research environment, I met the most brilliant scientists, made life-long friends, and to boot met my wife, Alexis Hill, who at the time was a graduate student in the Hen lab.

After 2 years in New York studying neural stem cells and performing neuronal lineage tracing, I became deeply interested in the molecular determinants of neuronal cell fate acquisition and maintenance, so I set off to St. Louis to begin my graduate work in the induction of neurogenesis in non-neuronal cells. Could the principles that govern neuronal cell fate be identified by reverse engineering neurons from somatic cells?