I am an environmental scholar researching how deforestation, industrial agriculture, and extractive infrastructures reshape landscapes, bodies, politics and forms of life in the Brazilian Amazon. My work focuses on the political ecologies of environmental destruction and on the ways Indigenous communities confront, reinterpret, and resist these processes.

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I am a researcher affiliated with the Pensi Institute (José Luiz Setúbal Foundation) and the Institute of Brazilian Studies at the University of São Paulo, and an associated researcher with Princeton University’s Fluid Futures initiative. I also collaborate with the project Transitions environnementales à l’ère de l’Anthropocène at the Maison du CNRS–USP and the research group Anthropologie de la vie (Collège de France).

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My research is grounded in long-term ethnographic fieldwork and informed by anthropology, science and technology studies (STS), and public health. I work at the intersection of environmental change and the environmental determinants of health, with a strong emphasis on interdisciplinary collaboration and public engagement.

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My research develops along three interconnected lines. First, I examine the incentives behind deforestation, including the financial, political, and ideological forces that drive environmental destruction. Second, I investigate the intersections of environment and health, focusing on how deforestation and industrial agriculture affect Amazonian communities through toxic contamination, disease emergence, and interactions with climate change. Third, I study Indigenous ecologies, with attention to knowledge systems and political strategies aimed at environmental protection and territorial resistance.

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I am currently revising my PhD dissertation into an academic book manuscript under contract with the University of California Press, based on long-term ethnographic research in the Brazilian Amazon.

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I hold a PhD from the University of São Paulo and was a visiting researcher at Cornell University. I completed postdoctoral fellowships at Princeton University and at the Collège de France (Laboratoire d’Anthropologie Sociale), and have taught courses on environmental politics and public health at both the University of São Paulo and Princeton University.

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My academic work has been published in journals such as Science, Environment and Planning E, and Mana and has received the USP Dissertation Award (Prêmio Tese Destaque USP, 2023). I am the author of The Life and Death of a Minke Whale in the Amazon (Milkweed Editions, 2022), a narrative nonfiction book praised by The New York Times, The Economist, and Los Angeles Review of Books. 

 

Alongside academic research, I work as a journalist and public writer. I am a four-time Pulitzer Center grantee and have published in outlets including National Geographic, Wired, The Guardian, Thomson Reuters Foundation, Revista Piauí, Nexo Jornal, Agência Pública, and InfoAmazônia. I am also the author of Em Rota de Fuga: ensaios sobre escrita, medo e violência (Hedra, 2020), and have produced essays, podcasts, and documentary projects.