Camila grew up in the South Region of Brazil and began undergraduate studies in Biotechnology at the Federal University of Paraná (UFPR) in 2012. Within her first months on campus, she joined a microbiology wet lab working on plant growth-promoting bacteria. She went on to complete an MSc (2017) and PhD (2021) in Genetics and Molecular Biology at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (PPGBM/UFRGS), the country’s oldest and one of the most recognised postgraduate programmes in the field.

At UFRGS, Camila worked with the SEMIA Culture Collection (>1200 agriculturally important bacterial strains used as plant inoculants that underpin Brazil’s successful crop-inoculation programme) and shifted decisively into computational biology, focusing on bacterial genomics. During her PhD, she secured support from the U.S. Department of Energy’s GEBA-IV initiative to sequence the collection’s common-bean strain subset.

From 2019 to 2022, Camila co-founded and co-led Agrega Pesquisa e Desenvolvimento em Biotecnologia, building workflows for (meta)genomics and (meta)barcoding analysis and securing competitive innovation grants, before returning to curiosity-driven research. In 2022, she moved to New York (USA) as a postdoctoral fellow at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, and in 2023 she was recruited to the Baker Heart and Diabetes Institute in Melbourne (Australia) to work with Dr Guillaume Méric, where she now studies links between the human microbiome and health in large, deeply phenotyped cohorts.

Her recent work spans three main projects:

1. Investigating how past infections predispose individuals to non-communicable diseases by exploring data from multiple population-based cohorts.
2. Characterising the ecological diversity and clinical associations of human gut archaea.
3. Exploring bacterial diversity and strain persistence in the infant respiratory microbiome over the first year of life.

Camila also holds honorary appointments with The University of Melbourne and Monash University, and maintains active collaborations across the UK, Finland, Sweden and Austria.