A clinician's long detour through the brain.

I grew up in Rio de Janeiro and trained as a doctor at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. Eight years of medical school in a public university teach you something specific about how illness, poverty and biology entangle — and they made psychiatry feel less like a specialty than an obligation.

The first decade of my career was spent in psychiatric wards: emergency rooms, inpatient units, outpatient clinics, community health centers. I trained in the public system and stayed in it long enough to see the same patients return — and sometimes to see them get better. I became a board-certified psychiatrist through the State University of Rio de Janeiro and built a private online practice serving Brazilian patients across borders, which I still run today.

In parallel, I kept pulling on the thread that had grabbed me as a student: the cognitive science of psychiatric disease. I started in the lab studying anti-saccade and visual-search performance in schizophrenia — eye movements as a window onto cognitive control — and presented that work at the Society for Neuroscience and the Canadian Neuroscience Association. A master's at UFRJ followed, then a postgraduate year at the D'Or Institute for Research and Education.

In 2022 I moved to Vancouver to start a PhD in neuroscience at the University of British Columbia, supported by the President Academic Excellence Award and the Faculty of Medicine Graduate Award. The Marshall Fellowship in UBC's Department of Psychiatry let me bridge clinical and research worlds — and the work I did on gaze-detection models for cognitive testing became the technical foundation for NeuroCog Technologies, the company I founded with the help of Entrepreneurship@UBC.

These days I split my time between clinical psychiatry, neuroscience research, and building software that turns objective cognitive measurement into something a clinician can actually use. I live in Squamish, British Columbia.