Veleda Muller's Biography
I started the bachelor in Geology in 2011 in the Federal University of Parana, in Curitiba, Brazil, driven by love by nature and mountains.
I do research since the first years of my bachelor, working with petrology, geochemistry, and structural geology of the Neoproterozoic metamorphic and igneous complexes of the Southern Ribeira Belt.
I did an exchange in the University of Salamanca, Spain, funded by the "Science without borders" brazilian scholarship, and I got to know the European Alpine and Variscan orogenic belts.
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During my master's, I realized a dream when I started studying the Patagonian Andes. I did one first field trip entirely by boat in the Pacific fjords of austral Patagonia, funded by a partnership between the Laboratory of Mineral and Rocks analysis (LAMIR) in Brazil, and the CONYCET, in Chile. I studied the metamorphic rocks of the Rocas Verdes Basin and the Magallanes Fold-and-thrust Belt, which resulted in my first paper in Tectonophysics.
Still during my master's, I did other two field trips to the Torres del Paine National Park, in Chile, to study the carbonatic rocks of Lake Sarmiento and Laguna Amarga, funded by the Project Microbial from LAMIR/UFPR/PETROBRAS.
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I started my PhD in 2019 in the University of Milano-Bicocca, in Italy, with a project on tectonic and climate interactions in mountain belts, still having the Patagonian Andes as the main study region. I did my PhD in collaboration with the University of Grenoble-Alps, in France, where I've been based by 1 year, and I performed thermal modeling of low-temperature thermochronology data from the Fitz Roy and Torres del Paine Massifs, now published in Tectonics. I learned Geodynamic numerical modeling and applied this knowledge to the study of erosion, tectonics, mantle dynamics, and volcanism, which resulted in the papers in Scientific Reports and Solid Earth. During my PhD I also did collaborations in research about the Alps participating on field trips, and I published a collaborative paper with the TOPO-EUROPE community about deep Earth and climate interactions and their societal impacts (Cloetingh et al., 2023).
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​Now in my postdoc in the University of Arizona, USA, I am working in the TANGO project to study the mechanisms of crustal thickening and topographic growth of the Andes using Geodynamic numerical modeling. I recently did a field trip to the Central Andes to study the orographic barrier and the fold-and-thrust belts of the Eastern Central Andes, collecting data for low-temperature thermochronology.
Recently, I've been interested in Biogeosciences and the topographic control on biodiversity, and I am part of the EUROBIG Cost Action to diffuse knowledge about Biogeosciences.
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In the next steps of my carrer, I aim to integrate field-work, geo-thermochronology, and modeling to study other mountain belts of the world, and the tectonic, climate, and biological interactions in those environments.