Fun Facts

My mother is from Sao Paulo, Brazil. My father has a cork farm in Portugal. I speak Portuguese. I have traveled to Portugal, Spain, Brazil, and Costa Rica. I have 4+ years of wet-lab research experience from laboratories at the miami">University of Miami, the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and the University of Arizona. I have one summer experience of field research in the Rainforests of NE Costa Rica. My traveling and laboratory experiences have given me insight on different cultures and on applying the scientific method, respectively. My current hobbies are rock climbing and reading.

About Me

I was born in and grew up in Clearwater, Florida. I went to a college preparatory high school in Tampa, Florida. I have a B.S. in Microbiology from the miami">University of Miami where I graduated Cum Laude. I'm finishing my M.S. in Immunobiology from the University of Arizona, where I studied human cytomegalovirus latency. I was originally in a PhD graduate program with the department of Immunobiology at the University of Arizona, however in the past year I have shifted my interest from wet-lab research to Science Education research. The major accelerators for the change were participating in outreach activities such as being a Science Fair Judge for two Elementary schools and being a Mentor for five undergraduate students. I am currently applying to a PhD program in Science Education at the University of Arizona where I will be working with Dr. Molly Bolger researching how students learn biological concepts. My career goal is to reform and improve science education.

In high school, I was a volunteer tucson">tutor for Dickenson Elementary School in Tampa, Florida. In college, I was a paid academic tucson">tutor for student athletes for 2 years where I explained course material in different ways to re-teach or reinforce subject content. I tutored in Biology, Math, and Spanish. I was promoted in my second year of tucson">tutoring to be a tucson">Tutor Leader where I helped train other tucson">tutors. In graduate school, I presented and communicated science to a large range of audiences (from explaining my research to high school students during tours of the Bio5 Research Building to giving poster or seminar presentations to different departments on campus).

In college, I was specifically a tucson">tutor for student-athletes. Athletes learn by doing; they are kinetic learners. That meant a lot of getting up and moving to explain concepts to them. From this experience, I found that there are a number of different learning styles and therefore, a number of different teaching styles. My tucson">tutoring approach then, is organic. I shape the tucson">tutoring based on the student's personality and their learning style. I also found that being genuine is key to tucson">tutoring. The student-athletes could pick up on whether you truly cared about them succeeding or not. I found being real and honest with them helped them respect me and focus better during our sessions. Another approach I tend to do is stay away from yes or no answers and avoid being the only one talking during the session. Learning and teaching requires back-and-forth discussion. When the student explains what their understanding of something is, I ask the student how and why he/she thinks that. For example, in a lesson about mitosis, I would start off explaining the steps of mitosis. At this point, this biological phenomenon is a series of facts. I can offer meaning to these facts by asking the student why they think a cell needs to divide. Or why they think the chromosomes line up the way they do during metaphase. What if the chromosomes didn't line up that way? Would that make it easier or harder to split the chromosomes evenly? In this way, they themselves are deriving meaning from these biological facts. After being a graduate student in science, I learned that many "textbook facts" are simply claims that scientists argue in favor for based on evidence from nature or controlled experiments. A large part of understanding is being able to participate in that argument and develop rationale for ones claim. Because of this insight from graduate school training, I will aim to have students do the same during their tucson">tutoring sessions.