Teaching
Undergraduate courses (UFMS)
Bioestatística — Ciências Biológicas
Compulsory undergraduate course (68 h) taught every year at INBio/UFMS. Covers descriptive statistics, sampling design, probability distributions, inference through hypothesis testing, and linear models (t-test, ANOVA, regression, chi-square).
Urban Ecology — Ciências Biológicas
Elective undergraduate course (51 h) for Biological Sciences students. Covers urban biodiversity, habitat fragmentation, the urban heat island, ecosystem responses, biological invasions, social inequality and the “luxury effect”, urban aquatic environments, contemporary evolution, and citizen science (iNaturalist + R). Offered in 2019/2 and 2022/2.
Comunidades de ambientes lênticos — Ciências Biológicas
Elective undergraduate course for Biological Sciences, offered in 2018. Covers the fundamentals of limnology, the physical and chemical features of lentic systems (stratification, light, oxygen, nutrients), adaptations of the organisms, community structure, metacommunity dynamics, trophic relationships, sampling techniques, an introduction to multivariate analysis of aquatic communities, and the management of lentic environments in the face of global change.
Ecologia de interações — Ciências Biológicas
Undergraduate course (51 h) for Biological Sciences (Bacharelado and Licenciatura), offered in 2017/2 and 2019/1. Competition, predation, parasitism and mutualism in an evolutionary context, with explicit models (Lotka-Volterra, Tilman, Nicholson-Bailey) explored in Populus and re-implemented in R, pre-class quizzes on the week’s readings, and a field practical on herbivory on campus.
History and Philosophy of Science — Ciências Biológicas
Undergraduate seminar course (51 h) offered in 2021/2 for the Biological Sciences (Bacharelado) programme at INBio/UFMS, under the administrative title Tópicos Especiais em Ciências Biológicas VI. Same seminar format as the graduate version — student pairs lead the discussion of weekly readings — but with introductory readings (Chalmers, French, Rubem Alves, Dutra, O Mundo de Sofia, Sagan). Covers epistemology, rationalism vs empiricism (Descartes, Hume, Kant), scientific theories, Popper, Kuhn, asking good scientific questions, and pseudoscience.
Estatística Descomplicada — YouTube channel
I run a YouTube channel — Estatística Descomplicada — with lessons on statistics aimed at biologists and other life-scientists. The content mirrors what I teach in graduate and undergraduate courses at UFMS: Generalized Linear (Mixed) Models, multivariate methods, study design, and the reproducible-analysis workflow in R.
Topics covered include hypothesis testing, GLM/GLMM with appropriate error families, ordinations (PCA, NMDS, RDA, CCA), classification, and how to read statistical results in the ecological literature without getting lost in the jargon. New videos are released as the academic semester progresses.
Graduate courses (UFMS)
Introduction to R
Intensive graduate course (30 h, one-week format) for the PPG in Ecology & Conservation at UFMS. Covers R from scratch: syntax, RStudio, data import, tidyverse (dplyr, tidyr, purrr, broom), data visualization with ggplot2, simple linear models, basic programming, version control with git/GitHub, and reproducible reports with R Markdown / Quarto. Designed for students arriving at R for the first time.
History and Philosophy of Science
Seminar-style graduate course (45 h) for the PPG in Ecology & Conservation at UFMS. Open to graduate students from any line of research. Covers the structure of scientific theories, induction vs deduction, Popper’s falsifiability, Kuhn’s revolutions, Lakatos’s research programmes, the nature of causality and explanation, holism vs reductionism in biology, and how science differs from pseudoscience. Reading-based discussion sessions led by student pairs.
Multidimensional analyses
Graduate course (45 h) for the Mestrado em Biologia Animal at UFMS, Campo Grande. Covers classification (hierarchical and k-means clustering, IndVal), unconstrained ordination (PCA, PCoA, nMDS, CA), constrained ordination (CCA, RDA, db-RDA, LDA), Mantel/Procrustes/PROTEST, and PERMANOVA — all hands-on in R with the vegan, ade4 and labdsv packages.
Phylogenetic comparative methods
Graduate course (45 h) for the Mestrado em Biologia Animal at UFMS, Campo Grande. Covers Brownian motion, PGLS, ancestral state reconstruction, phylogenetic signal, multi-regime OU models, and multivariate extensions — all hands-on in R. Open to graduate students from any line of research with basic familiarity with phylogenetic inference.
Course site & materials → Mind map summarising the methods →
Análise de dados univariados
Intensive graduate course (45 h, one-week format, 21–25 September 2026) for the PPG in Biologia Animal at UFMS, Campo Grande. Presents the usual statistical tests as a single family under the linear model, then relaxes its assumptions one at a time: the distribution of the response (GLM — likelihood, binomial and Poisson, diagnostics, overdispersion, zero inflation), the independence of observations (GLMM — rationale for random effects, implementation and Bayesian approaches), uncertainty in model selection (information theory), and multivariate responses (model-based methods and joint species distribution models). Opens with exploratory data analysis, reproducibility, and AI literacy.
Short-courses, workshops and past courses
2026 — IA na revisão de literatura (PT)
Upcoming · 19 October 2026 · workshop (2 h) for the PPG in Biologia Animal, UFMS · in Portuguese
Hands-on workshop on AI-assisted literature searching. How the web stopped being machine-readable and why that reaches your review; why hallucinated references and blocked crawlers are two different failure modes; machine-readable bibliographic databases (OpenAlex, Semantic Scholar) and the openalexR and litsearchr routes in R; a live demonstration of citation fabrication checked against CrossRef; and a hands-on comparison of Consensus and Undermind against a reproducible Boolean search. Closes on what the published evidence says about sensitivity vs precision, on reproducibility under PRISMA-S/ROSES, and on how to declare an AI-assisted search. Companion to the talk IA na redação científica.
2019 — Introduction to Macroevolution & Phylogenetic Comparative Methods (PT)
Short-course given at the III Congresso Paulista de Ciências Biológicas (III CPBio), IBILCE/UNESP (São José do Rio Preto), May 2019. Introduces macroevolution — the evolution of phenotypes above the species level — and the phylogenetic comparative methods used to study it. Four parts: fundamentals of evolution, comparative methods, applied examples from the recent literature, and the lab’s current research lines.
2012 — Mendeley demo, Universidade Federal de Goiás
2011 — Ecological statistics with R
Tópicos em Biologia Animal — Estatística aplicada à ecologia usando o R. A two-week graduate course in Animal Biology at UNESP (São Paulo State University), in collaboration with Thiago Gonçalves-Souza and Fernando R. da Silva. We covered Generalized Linear Models, the main multivariate methods, and other ecological tools, using R as the analysis platform. It gave rise to the course book Estatística aplicada à ecologia usando o R, hosted by CRAN.
2009 — Sampling techniques for vertebrates (PT)
Short course (4 h) for undergraduates at UNESP, given as a pre-meeting course at the 4º Simpósio de Biologia Animal. Ricardo Brassaloti and I covered field sampling techniques for the four classes of vertebrates.
Course page — slides and bibliography →
Recommended bibliography
- Colwell, R.K. & Coddington, J.A. 1994. Estimating terrestrial biodiversity through extrapolation. Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B 345:101–118. PDF
- Dias, S.C. 2004. Planejando estudos de diversidade e riqueza: uma abordagem para estudantes de graduação. Acta Scientiarum 26:373–9. PDF
- Gotelli, N. & Colwell, R.K. 2001. Quantifying biodiversity: procedures and pitfalls in the measurement and comparison of species richness. Ecology Letters 4:379–391. PDF
- Sutherland, W.J. (Ed.) 2006. Ecological census techniques: a handbook. 2nd ed. Cambridge University Press.