She received her PhD from the Dept. of Production Engineering of the Federal University of Santa Catarina in Brazil, in a "sandwich” program collaboration with the Dept. of Industrial & Management Systems Engineering of the University of South Florida in Tampa. She has a master’s degree in operations research and a bachelor’s degree in business administration. She was a postdoc at the Navy Center for Applied Research in Artificial Intelligence at the Naval Research Lab in Washington, DC. Her key research interest is knowledge engineering and management, using intelligent methods and techniques such as case-based reasoning, information extraction, fuzzy sets, genetic algorithms, neural networks, and ontologies in applications in domains such as law, defense, nutrition, medicine, finance, biology, and psychology.