I am a dual American and Brazilian citizen. I was born in Brazil and moved to the United States when I was 3 years old. When I was 9 years old my family moved to Belgium where I completed the majority of my primary education. Upon completing middle school, my family returned to Michigan, where I completed high school. In 2003, after high school, I moved to California to study Chemical Engineering and Portuguese at Stanford University, where I later completed a master's degree in Computer Science and a PhD in Learning Sciences and Technology Design.

When I'm not doing research I can normally be found cooking, reading, gardening, spending time with my family or participating in a range of sporting activities: skiing, running, basketball, biking, capoeira, gymnastics, swimming and soccer. I also like to take advantage of any opportunity to try or build something new. In the kitchen this amounts to coming up with new recipes. In other areas, it results in a lot of "protoypes" that my oldest daughter gets to inherit as toys and props for fantasy play and drawing.