Growing up in Rio, frequent visits to the National Museum and learning to dive and spearfish with my dad I developed a fascination about the natural world, mainly of aquatic life. Finding marine fossils was the final straw to completely push me towards a career in natural history. I decided to merge both my passions on fishes and extinct creatures. Thus, I became an ichthyologist and paleontologist. Through combining cutting-edge imaging techniques on both fossil and extant taxa I am capable of understand the variation in form of different components of the fish body. During my PhD I dove into exceptional soft-tissue preservation of neural tissues in Paleozoic fish fossils. This led me to notice a gap in our understanding of neuroanatomical diversity in extant ray-finned fishes, which is arguibly the most successful vertebrate lineage in extant settings. Currently my career plan is to dive even deeper into drivers of neuroanatomical diversification and co-evolution of different modules of the fish skull.