Aretha F. Guimaraes is an accomplished biologist with a distinguished academic career. She holds a Ph.D. in Applied Botany from the Universidade Federal de Lavras (UFLA), where she won the CAPES Award for Best Thesis in 2021. Her research focuses on plant-soil interactions in metal-rich environments and biodiversity in Brazil. Aretha has published several influential articles, including three as the first author. Her postdoctoral work at the Instituto Nacional de Pesquisas da Amazônia (INPA) addresses critical gaps in biodiversity knowledge in Brazil. She also played a pivotal role in organizing big data for biodiversity programs such as PPBio and PELD

Aretha F. Guimaraes pursued her postdoctoral research from 2022 to 2023 at the Instituto Nacional de Pesquisas da Amazônia (INPA), focusing on addressing the Linnean and Wallacean shortfalls in Brazilian biodiversity. She earned her Ph.D. in Applied Botany from the Universidade Federal de Lavras (UFLA) in 2021, with a thesis titled “The haunting of the souls hill: spooky plant-soil interactions lead to bonsai trees in a serpentine Neotropical forest,” supervised by Dr. Nick Ostle, Dr. Eduardo van den Berg, Dr. Marines Pires, and Dr. Gabriela Siewerding Meirelles. Prior to her Ph.D., she completed her M.Sc. in Forest Ecology at UFLA in 2017, with a dissertation on “Tree functional trait patterns across a chronosequence,” under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Eduardo van den Berg. She holds a B.Sc. in Biology from UFLA, obtained in 2014, where she authored a monograph titled “Unveiling neotropical serpentine flora.”

Aretha F. Guimaraes has received significant recognition for her academic contributions, including the CAPES Award for Best Thesis from the Department of Applied Botany at Universidade Federal de Lavras (UFLA) in 2021. Additionally, she was honored with the Best Conference Presentation Award at the XXII Congresso da Pós-Graduação da UFLA in the same year.