ABOUT
ABOUT
My name is Paulo, but many friends and colleagues also call me Callithrix—a nickname I got while an undergrad in biology. Call me as you wish!
I always wanted to be a scientist. As many people, during my childhood I had my dinosaurs’ phase, passing also through sharks’, spiders’, and always enjoyed watching wildlife documentaries. During my graduation, at the Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais (UFMG), I worked with coleopterans, spiders, benthic macroinvertebrates, besides helping several friends and colleagues in the field (fieldwork with fish, birds, wasps, caves…). Finally, I started in herpetology, field in which I’ve been working until today. I always worked with taxonomy and systematics, especially with the hylid treefrogs. During my masters, I worked on phylogenetic systematics of Hypsiboas (currently Boana) using phenotypic data, under the supervision of Prof. Paulo C. A. Garcia, also at UFMG. I did my PhD at the Universidade Estadual Paulista (UNESP). There, I worked under the supervision of Prof. Julián Faivovich, and was co-advised by Prof. Célio F. B. Haddad. In my thesis I used DNA sequence data to generate a phylogeny for the genus Boana. My results allowed me to work with several taxonomic aspects within the hylid tribe Cophomantini (to which Boana belongs), describing new species and a new genus, besides revising the taxonomic status of some taxa. Also, those phylogenetic results opened new ways to study the evolution of the prepollical spine in the tribe, a bone located in anuran hands. |
After that I did my first post-doctorate at the Universidade de São Paulo (USP), under Prof. Taran Grant supervision, at the Laboratório de Anfíbios, funded by the Fundação do Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo (FAPESP). During this postdoc I started exploring the evolutionary convergence of one specialization of the prepollex, the spine-shaped morphology, throughout Anura. I’m curious to understand how such specific morphological structure evolved more than once in the anuran tree of life. As part of this project, I spent six months at the Florida Museum of Natural History (University of Florida), with Prof. David C. Blackburn and another six months in the Biodiversity Institute (University of Kansas) with Prof. Rafe Brown.
The first post-doctorate ended but the prepollex research did not. Now I am my second postdoc at the National Museum of Natural History (Smithsonian Institution), as a Peter Buck fellow, under Prof. Kevin de Queiroz supervision.
The first post-doctorate ended but the prepollex research did not. Now I am my second postdoc at the National Museum of Natural History (Smithsonian Institution), as a Peter Buck fellow, under Prof. Kevin de Queiroz supervision.