He also acts as a researcher for CNPq, the Brazilian National Science Foundation, and holds a membership of the IEEE Computational Intelligence Society. In addition, he was recently awarded funding from FAPESP, the research foundation of the State of São Paulo, for a research project on methods of computational intelligence and image processing based on mathematical morphology and lattice algebra. He previously worked as a research assistant and visiting professor at the Center of Computer Vision and Visualization at the University of Florida where he completed his Ph.D. in mathematics - partially supported by a Fulbright Scholarship - in 1996.