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. 

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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.).

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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.

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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.

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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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