Stéphanie Vaz succesfully defended her PhD thesis yesterday, 14th november, by teleconference. She’s now a doctor in Ecology for the Universidade Federal de Rio de Janeiro.

Stéphanie’s PhD seeks to analyse the threats affecting the distribution of the Atlantic Forest fireflies, a group of beetles in one of the most affected biomes of the planet. Besides land transformation and deforestation, Stéphanie has worked on describing the impact of light polution and climate change. Her thesis includes also a great deal of compiling biodiversity databases (see here) and analysing their coverage, geograpic and enviromental biases, and the limitations of the information they provide to describe the responses of endemic fireflies to environment, global change stressors. She was co-supervised by Paulo Paiva and Maria Lucia Lorini from the Universidade Federal de Rio de Janeiro, and Alejandra Zarzo-Arias of the Museo Nacional de Ciencias Naturales and Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, taking profit from a secondment at MNCN with her and Joaquín Hortal. Some of Stéphanie’s works are already published, and some will como out in the forthcoming months.

Parabéns Stéphanie!!!!