I am currently a Postdoctoral Associate, responsible for the Smart Fruit Phenomics Team in the Blueberry breeding and Genomics Laboratory at University of Florida. The team studies methods of implementing engineering solutions for acquiring multimodal phenotypic data in crops, which can be used for assisting breeders and growers obtaining faster and more reliable data.

I have over 8 years of engineering experience in academia and industry. Before joining the University of Florida, I was a researcher at the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology - AIST (Tokyo, Japan), working on teaching by demonstration approaches for robot manipulation from September 2021 to January 2023. Earlier, I was a researcher at the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at the University of Tsukuba (Tsukuba, Japan), From April 2017 to September 2021, where I focused on assistive devices for supporting children with special needs and on robotic devices for physical rehabilitation. Between June 2012 and March 2016, I worked as a commissioning engineer at Durr Systems, responsible for commissioning painting processes and conveyors in the automotive industry for companies such as Volkswagen, Land Rover, General Motors, Ford, among others. Additionally, from April 2011 to June 2012, I served as a maintenance engineer at Sama Associate Mining, responsible for developing maintenance plans with subcontractors and implementing improvements to enhance equipment availability.

In terms of my academic achievements, I hold a Ph.D. degree in Robotics from the Systems and Information Engineering School at the University of Tsukuba, Japan. Furthermore, I earned a Master’s degree with a focus on Automation from the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Taubate, Brazil.

My research interests are centered around the utilization of robotics to enhance phenomics and provide biologists with more accurate data. This involves developing mechanical devices for percussing crops, implementing computer vision techniques to track objects, and developing solutions for fruit manipulation. Moreover, I am interested in extracting meaningful information from this data to enhance plant breeding through the application of data science techniques, including statistical methods and machine learning for data detection and clustering. Ultimately, my goal is to develop technological solutions for smart cropping that can expedite phenotype evaluation and disease diagnosis.