Rafael Menezes dos Santos

[he/him] Rafael is a Ph.D. candidate at the Ecology graduate program (University of São Paulo - USP) under the supervision of Ricardo Martinez-Garcia (IFT-UNESP/ICTP-SAIFR). His Ph.D. research explores the interface between movement ecology and population/community ecology, expanding models of populations and communities through realistic assumptions concerning the movement of organisms. Rafael holds a master's, bachelor's and teaching degree in physics from the Federal University of Bahia (UFBA). Between 2012 and 2014, Rafael was a CNPq and FAPESB fellow in the Young Talents for Science (2012-13) and PIBIC (2013-14) programs, under the supervision of Alexandre Leite Gadelha. Since then, he has worked on interdisciplinary projects focusing on ecological questions. He participated in the Science without Borders (SwB) program as an exchange student at Radboud University-Nijmegen (NL) in 2014-15. In Nijmegen, he conducted the research "Trends expected in stressed ecosystems", under the supervision of Jan Hendriks (Environmental Sciences Dep.), now published in the journal Ecological Indicators (https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecolind.2017.04 .017). Upon returning to Brazil, he developed research in epidemiology under the supervision of Suani Pinho and Flora Bacelar, with a PIBIC grant funded by FAPESP (2016-17). During his Master's, funded by CAPES, he investigated the influence of the type, topology and intensity of interspecific interactions on the coexistence and stability of ecological communities, under the supervision of Suani Pinho and co-supervision of Flora Bacelar and Pedro Meirelles (2017-20). During his training, he was part of several courses on mathematical biology, such as the VI Southern-Summer School on Mathematical Biology-SSSMB (ICTP-SAIFR, 2018) and the highly competitive Quantitative Biology Training Program (QTB - ICTP-SAIFR / Inst. Serrapilheira, 2021). He was a monitor of the SSSMB in the years 2019 and 20 and of QTB - ICTP-SAIFR / Inst. Serrapilheira, 2023. Rafael is part of the Statistical Physics and Complex Systems (FESC) group of the Physics Institute of UFBA and of the INCT IN-TREE project in the PI1 division: Mathematical, computational and statistical modeling applied to ecology and evolution. (Source: Lattes Curriculum)