Variluska Fragoso

Variluska currently works as a principal investigator of her independent research group at the Institute of Environmental Research of São Paulo. She investigates the relationships between different levels of biodiversity - taxonomic, genetic, phytochemical, and interactions - using a variety of chemical and molecular tools. She is primarily focused on plants of the Piper group, an established ecological model for tropical studies, as well as the interactions that these plants establish with their associated insects - herbivores and predators of herbivores - in multitrophic networks. From 2019 to 2022, she worked at the Chemistry of Natural Products Lab. in the Chemistry Institute at USP as an independent post-graduate fellow funded by PDJ-CNPq. In the period prior to and following this fellowship, she had two maternity leaves. From 2014 to 2016, she held a post-doctoral position at the Molecular Ecology Department in the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology in Germany, where she also obtained her PhD in 2014. Her involvement with research started in 2000 when Variluska undertook her bachelor?s and master?s degrees at the Plant Physiology Lab. in the Graduate Program in Cell and Molecular Biology of the Center for Biotechnology at UFRGS. Topics of interest: tropical biodiversity, native species, plant-insect interactions, chemical ecology, plant secondary metabolism, field work, non-model species, ecophysiology. (Source: Lattes Curriculum)