I love it. At the university, my daily tasks include running laboratory experiments, teaching labs, and writing scientific articles for adults and kids.
This has been my routine since I moved here in 2016, specifically to work on my Ph.D. in Soil Ecology (the study of species living in soils and how they interact with each other and with the environment) at The University of Western Ontario. At this point, I am almost ready to graduate, and only the future will tell where I’ll go next! At Western, I’m studying how climate change affects tiny animals living in soils, and I’ll tell you what… it’s not treating them very well! But that’s something we will get into a little later.
I am originally from Brazil and grew up speaking Portuguese, a language I have used during all my studies until 2016. I graduated with an undergraduate degree in Biological Sciences in 2012, and my research project looked at some species of insects that can transmit a disease called Chagas Disease. This disease (which mostly impacts the heart) still occurs in poor areas of Brazil, but also areas where humans have been cutting down trees for city expansion. Usually, these insects do not feed on humans, but when humans invade their natural space, the game changes and we must be careful.
I started to learn English as a university student when I was 20, and I fell in love with all the possibilities that communicating in this language could bring me. I needed English to understand the scientific papers that I was fascinated by. Coming from a low-income family, I’ve been very privileged to have the opportunity to learn a second language--my uncle paid for my language classes.
