is a US biologist and neuroscientist, researcher, writer, columnist for the Folha de São Paulo newspaper, and an Associate Professor at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, United States. She is also the first female Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Comparative Neurology, the oldest journal specializing in neuroscience.

Born in Brazil, she graduated in Biology at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, got a Master’s degree in Neuroscience at Case Western Reserve University in the US, and obtained her PhD at the University of Paris VI, France, while working at the Max-Planck Institute for Brain Research in Frankfurt, Germany.

Her contributions to neuroscience include several new concepts that refute long-held intuitions about what brains are made of and how the human brain, with its 86 billion neurons, evolved. More recently, she discovered that the T-Rex was the primate of its time, and that the brain economy is not demand-based, but supply-limited: adult brains use all the energy that they can, which explains why they are so susceptible to aging and disease.