I was born in April 1976 in Brasília, the modern and young capital of Brasil. Son of an adventurous Argentine and a charming and intelligent Kentucky girl, I spent 4 years of my childhood in Natal, in the Northeast of the country, playing in the beach with my older sister. In 1982 we moved back to Brasília, where I grew up during the eighties, passively (not really) observing my country's redemocratization while riding my bicycle through widespread remnants of Cerrado vegetation in my backyard. I attended highschool during the early nineties and after one semester as a physics major at the University of Campinas in 1995, I finally gave up and changed to the field I aways loved: Biology.

Throughout my four undergraduate years at UnB (Universidade de Brasília) I switched from lab to lab, trying to find exactly what I wanted to work with. Before landing at the Laboratory of Electron Microscopy to work under Sônia Nair Báo and Guarino Rinaldi Colli (with frog sperm evolutionary morphology), I worked in no less than five different labs, with topics as different as plant fire ecology and protein folding biophysics.

During my masters two and a half years I was granted with opportunities to travel to several different parts of Brasil with my co-advisor Guarino Colli and his students, rapidly increasing my passion for both herps and outdoors. In February 2002 I defended my masters thesis at the University of Campinas (Unicamp). In some of these field trips we were joined by Janalee Caldwell and Laurie Vitt (Guarino's former PhD advisor). It was back then that Dr. Caldwell agreed to have me as a PhD student at OU, and I joined the program in the Fall of 2002. My current dissertation and research interests are Systematics, Biogeography, and Ecology of Pseudinae frogs. My personal professional goal is to graduate and move back to Brasil to work with Herpetology, University education, and conservation.

I feel that anyone who has had a chance to get good education in a country as unequal as Brasil must pay back. This can be done in several ways but whatever one chooses as his/hers means, goals ultimately must focus on efforts to change current social and conservation realities of a country culturally and environmentally so beautiful, and yet in such a bad need of identity and equality! It shouldn't be a burden to go back to such a country (but in fact several researches leave and never come back, a phenomenon know as brainscape). In countries with such a recent history of scientific tradition brainscape has terrible consequences. It ultimately delays the structural changes needed to ensure a fair society and the perpetuation of scientific tradition. All these have undeniable consequences to conservation itself.

As every South American country Brasil is plagued with recent unstable political history and poverty. Nevertheless, it's 180 million habitants inhabit a country as big as continental US with an impressive megadiversity. People are incredibly kind (as anyone who has worked in the interior of Brasil knows) and there is still great deal of relativelly conserved land and Native Cultures. More importantly, there is a growing genuine interest in conservation throughout the nation due to current understanding of the treasure we have in our hands. And it is only with science, education, and social responsability that preservation of natural landscapes will be reached.