About me
I was born and raised in Montes Claros, a city located in the northern of Minas Gerais (MG) state, Brazil. I pursued my undergraduate studies in Biological Sciences (2008-2011) at the Universidade Estadual de Montes Claros. In the first semester I joined to the Insect Ecology laboratory (LEI), coordinated by Professor Dr. Frederico Neves. During this period, I had the opportunity to support several colleagues in the fieldwork who studied different groups of insects such as ants, butterflies, dung beetles, and bees. For my BSc thesis I developed a project about of the effects of habitat heterogeneity on herbivore insect communities in a tropical dry forest (TDF). This endeavor provided me with valuable insights and experience.
For the master's degree, I moved to Belo Horizonte, the capital city of MG. I enrolled in the postgraduate program in Ecology, Conservation and Wildlife Management at the Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais (UFMG). I was supervised by Dr. Frederico Neves (who recently had moved to UFMG) and developed a project on the role of cocoa agroforestry systems in the conservation of canopy insects. I worked for the first time in a tropical rainforest, in the Mata Atlântica (Atlantic Forest). I also took my first field course, where I designed a project associated with the use of dry Cecropia leaves as a refuge for arthropods. This project resulted in my first article in a peer-review journal a few years later (Novais et al. 2015, Braz. J. Biol.).
My PhD studies (2014-2018), also at UFMG, were conducted under the direction of Dr. Mauricio Quesada, researcher at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM) and collaborating professor at UFMG. I stayed in Brazil for a year and a half taking courses and then I moved with my wife Alessandra to Mexico, where I conducted extensive fieldwork in a TDF, investigating the role of a twig-girdler beetle as an ecosystem engineer for other arthropods. I evaluated how the impact of this ecosystem engineering varied across different spatial and temporal scales. During this period, our study site was hit by a major hurricane (Patricia), which gave me a unique opportunity to assess how canopy insects and epiphytic plants were affected by this natural disturbance.
After completing my PhD, I had a postdoctoral stay at UNAM (2019). With Mauricio Quesada, I evaluated the role of abandoned dead domatia in facilitating arthropod diversity in a TDF. Then I returned to Brazil as a postdoctoral researcher associated with a Long-Term Ecological Research Project supervised by Dr. Geraldo W. Fernandes (2020-2021) at UFMG. In brief, the project evaluates how global changes affect biodiversity along a mountain gradient, from cerrado (Brazilian savanna) at lower elevation to campo rupestre formations at higher elevations. During this stay, I collaborated in different research projects of PhD students and conducted a study evaluating the short-term effects of fire on termite diversity along the mountain gradient. In July 2020, my first daughter, Elisa, was born.
Finally, my professional journey led me back to Mexico (2021), where I have been engaged as an Associate Researcher at Institute of Ecology (INECOL, AC). It was during this period that our family welcomed our second daughter, Lara, into the world.
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