Biography
I was born in Poços de Caldas, Minas Gerais – Brazil. A middle sized city 300 km away from São Paulo and 500 km from Rio de Janeiro. Poços is one of the best Brazilian cities to live in. It is widely known for its water fountains, agricultural and industrial production, especially daily products. The city has extensive mineral reserves composed mainly by bauxite and uranium.
My interest in physics began when I was in high school. In the first year of high school I demonstrated great skills in physics and mathematics, which caught the attention of my teachers. Due to their invitation, I participated in the Brazilian Physics Olympiad. This is a national competition gathering 50 thousand students whose ultimate aim is to select students for the international physics Olympiad (IPHO). I obtained good results in this Olympiad and due to this achievement, I was granted a full scholarship at one the best boarding schools in the region. Thanks to this scholarship I was able to improve my performance and win 2 silver medals in 2014 and 2015 (K11 and K12).
At the end of high school I was sure of my future as a physicist. I was helping my colleagues learning physics and mathematics, leading group studies prior to exams, presenting solutions to difficult problems in front of the class. Besides it, I even ventured myself giving private tutoring classes.
After it I was accepted as an undergraduate physics studies at the University of Campinas, one of the best Brazilian universities. I came across several possibilities during my undergraduate. I worked with classical mechanics and electromagnetism during the first half of my undergraduate and with computer simulations and image processing during the last part. Throughout this period I worked as an intern in my university, supporting academic extension programs and summer activities related to physics teaching.
Among the activities were:
Demonstration of low cost experiments: Weekly event held at the university where high students are invited to interact with low cost (and easily reproducible) experiments and attend a physics lecture.
Summer program: A one week physics course designed for high school students in which they perform practical activities (physics experiments guided by university instructors).
Planetarium: Presentations of physics and astronomy lectures at the Campinas’ Planetarium to high school students.
Unicamp Portas Abertas (UPA): An Open University day in which 45 thousand high school students are invited to visit the university and learn about its undergraduate programs.
In my final year at Unicamp I took an internship at the Center for Biomedical Engineering (CEB). During which I developed a software for quality control of medical images.
After completing my undergraduate studies I joined Accenture, one of the world's most admired companies. I joined the risk management workforce at the Rio de Janeiro office in Brazil. My responsabilities included development of test cases, implementation of accounting modules and migration of codes written in Delphi to C#.
In 2011 I received an offer to join KAUST, King Abdullah University of Science and Technology in Saudi Arabia as a graduate student. One of the most exciting events in my carrier, joining a university designed to be groundbreaking, changing the way of doing science, the local culture and economy. This provided outstanding opportunities ranging from technical development to human skills. At kaust my focus was geophysical imaging techniques, reservoir modeling and history matching. I my thesis I dealt with the history matching of time-lapse seismic data attributes using the Ensemble Kalman Filter.
I currently work for Aramco, the largest oil company in the planet. I joined Aramco in 2013 immediately after graduating from Kaust (I defended my thesis on the 13th of May and was officially hired by Aramco on May 15!).
During 6 years I worked in the gas simulation group at the Reservoir Simulation and Description Department. And in my final two years at Aramco I worked in the Berri field. Being responsible for reservoir simulation for all the 7 reservoirs currently in produciton.