I grew up in São Paulo, Brazil, with a stint of two years in Paris, France (my parents were academics themselves and had a sabbatical period in Paris then), where I attended a French lycée. This was a life-changing experience for me, and in particular my love for mathematics developed during this period. But I also loved literature, cinema, the arts, and for a long time I was told that I could not be both scientifically-oriented and enjoy the world of letters and arts at the same time. After moving back to Brazil and studying philosophy at the University of São Paulo, I realized that yes, I could be interested in both, and in fact in much more! I like to say that philosophy is the place where all disciplines meet, and is the ideal place for people who are curious about everything. I’ve been doing philosophy for over 30 years now, and look forward to many more years of philosophizing!

After studying philosophy and mathematics at the University of São Paulo, I moved to the Netherlands for my Master’s degree in logic at the Institute for Logic, Language and Computation (ILLC) of the University of Amsterdam. I ended up staying, and went on to do a PhD on the history and philosophy of logic under the supervision of B.G. Sundholm at Leiden University. (From him I inherited the coolest academic genealogy ever, with Turing as my academic great-grandfather!) After that I spent two years living in New York City, finishing my dissertation and then doing a post-doc with a loose affiliation with the CUNY Graduate Center. Back to the Netherlands in 2007, I worked at the ILLC until 2011 with a NWO-funded VENI project. In 2011, I moved to the University of Groningen, where I led a NWO-VIDI project called ‘The Roots of Deduction’. In 2018 I moved to the VU Amsterdam, and started leading a ERC Consolidator project, ‘The Social Epistemology of Argumentation’, which ran until 2024. My current research interests pertain primarily to the legacies of colonialism in scientific and epistemic practices, in part drawing on my own experiences of growing up in a former colony (Brazil) and living most of my adult life in a colonizer country (the Netherlands).

Outside of my work as an academic, I enjoy dancing (salsa, bachata, forró, samba, almost anything really), snorkeling, karaoke, hiking, and spending time with my daughters, my cat Shadow, and my partner.