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.

• 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.
• 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!
• Jiansi Gao, Erick Matsen and many of the usual suspects and I have just BioarXived a massive undertaking towards understanding what makes phylodynamic inference so challenging. Special congratulations are in order to Jay for leading this amazing work!