Hi there,

I am a Lecturer (Professor Adjunto) at the School of Applied Mathematics (EMAp), Getulio Vargas Foundation (FGV). I also hold an Adjunct Assistant Professor position at the department of Biostatistics of the Gillings School of Global Public Health, University of North Carolina Chapel Hill. I hold a BSc in Microbiology and Immunology from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (Brazil) and a PhD in Evolutionary Biology from the University of Edinburgh (United Kingdom).

Research: Biological processes (such as mutation, selection, development, infection, etc 🧬 🐛 🌱 🦠) are the product of complex interactions between hundreds to hundreds of thousands of dynamic entities. I use Mathematics and Statistics 📊📐 to try and make sense of the data people collect on these processes, hoping to help paint a more complete picture of Nature. See my CV for more information on papers and other academic publications (Google Scholar Profile). A collection of presentations I have given over the years is also available.

Teaching: I teach courses on Statistical Inference (undergraduate, graduate), Statistical Modelling, Computational Statistics and Bayesian Statistics.

• 📫 Preferred mode of communication is via email.

• ⚡ Fun facts: Other than babbling about science, I like football ⚽ (watching and playing), opera 🎼 (watching and annoying others) and grappling 🥋 (watching and practising), in this particular order. Oh, and I’m also a dad and a husband 👶👶 👩‍❤️‍👨.

If you are a student and would like to work with me, I suggest you browse my Student Projects repo and see if anything tickles your curiosity.

• Our paper on the Episcanner framework is now out at the Royal Society Open Science. Congratulations are in order for Eduardo and Flávio, who led this amazing work!
• Our paper with Jiansi Gao, Erick Matsen and many of the usual suspects has been accepted at PNAS, which moves towards understanding what makes phylodynamic inference so challenging. Special congratulations are in order to Jay for leading this massive undertaking! [PNAS] [BioarXiv].

• In "Locking and Quacking: Stacking Bayesian model predictions by log-pooling and superposition" we look at how to use log-linear mixtures to combine predictive densities while bypassing the normalising constant via optimising the Hyvarinen score.
• In this paper now accepted at Statistica Sinica, Yueqi Shen, Matt Psioda, Joe Ibrahim and I discuss approaches for setting the (hyper)prior on the discounting factor when performing a normalised power prior analysis. It won the ENAR Student paper award and the SBSS award at JSM! Congratulations, Yueqi! [Supplemental Material]. [preprint].
• In "Exploring the Connection Between the Normalized Power Prior and Bayesian Hierarchical Models" Yueqi Shen, Matt Psioda, Joe Ibrahim and I look into matching the normalised power prior (NPP) to the Bayesian hierarchical model (BHM) in order to make comparable inferences.
• Our paper on looking at tree-focused (i.e. 'topological') diagnostics for MCMC in phylogenetic space is now on out in Virus Evolution. [Preprint]. Joint work with all the usual suspects.
• Our paper on validation for statistical software used in Bayesian phylogenetics has now been accepted at Systematic Biology. [Preprint] [code].
• Rodrigo Alves, Yuri Saporito and I have ArXived a preprint on the lumpability of tree-valued Markov processes. This took two years of hard work and I'm glad for it to see the light of day!
• My colleagues from the Mosqlimate project (funded by @wellcometrust) and I have recently ArXived two manuscripts: one on the Mosqlimate data platform and another on the long-term modelling of arboviroses.