Suzana Diniz

Since the age of 8 years old I wanted to study biology. This dream came true in the year of 2004, when I was approved in the exams of the State University of Campinas, in São Paulo, Brazil. There, I accomplished a Bachelor degree in Biology and carried out my first research, which was about inbreeding in social spiders.

During my undergraduate time, I also carried out other smaller researches, such as the histological ontogeny of the lung from the fish Arapaima gigas and natural history of the colubrid snake Thamnodynastes nattereri.

In the year of 2008 I started my master degree, when I researched about how plant architecture influences the community of spiders and insects. Now I am a Ph.D. student and my thesis focuses on population dynamics of social spiders (Anelosimus). For my Ph.D. research, I performed three years of field work in Serra do Japi, one of the rare remnants of inner Atlantic Forest in southeastern Brazil. I spent about five months per year in the field to obtain the data about populations of social spiders. Unfortunately, my research funding has already finished. However, I still want to continue my research projects on spider ecology.

Here are some of my publications:

Fischer et al. (2014). Journal of medical entomology,51(3), 547-559

Diniz, S. (2011). Herpetology Notes, 4, 357-358.

Diniz et al. (2012). Psyche: A Journal of Entomology, 2012.

September 2016