Hi there,

I am a Lecturer (Professor Adjunto) at the School of Applied Mathematics (EMAp), Getulio Vargas Foundation (FGV). 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.

• Guido Moreira and I have just ArXived a paper on adaptive truncation of infinite series with applications to Statistics. It comes with a powerful R package, sumR. Check it out!
• My paper on log-linear mixtures with Flavio Coelho, Daniel Villela and Leo Bastos is now out in Bayesian Analysis. [paper] [code].
• Lucas Moschen and I just arxived a preprint on a complete statistical treatment of (a particular construction of) the bivariate beta distribution. [code].
• @adamesalles just got a nice scientific initiation scholarship from INCTMat to work on shape-constrained GPs. Congratulations, Adame!
• Collegues from Auckland and I just (bio)arxived a paper on validation for statistical software used in Bayesian phylogenetics. [paper] [code].
• Our preprint on looking at tree-focused (i.e. 'topological') diagnostics for MCMC in phylogenetic space is now on ArXiv. Joint work with all the usual suspects.
• 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 Laplace 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.