Hi! Welcome! I’m Wagner Alan Aparecido da Rocha. I was born in Mogi-Guaçu, São Paulo, Brazil, but my roots are in Inconfidentes, a small town in Minas Gerais – which gave me a mix of urban upbringing and rural heritage. Right now, I’m on my second postdoctoral researcher journey, continuing to explore the intersection of math, science, and real-world problems. Over the years, I’ve grown passionate about using mathematical tools to tackle real-world challenges.

I’ve been at the University of Campinas (UNICAMP), in Campinas, São Paulo, Brazil, for most of my academic journey – both my undergraduate and graduate studies were carried out at the Institute of Mathematics, Statistics, and Scientific Computing (IMECC), and I also spent time at the “Gleb Wataghin” Institute of Physics (IFGW), two institutes of UNICAMP. During my Ph.D., I had the opportunity to spend a research period abroad at the Laboratoire d’informatique de l’École Polytechnique (LIX), part of the École Polytechnique/Institut Polytechnique de Paris, in Palaiseau (a commune in the southern suburbs of Paris), France.

Here’s a quick summary of my academic background:

During my bachelor’s degree, I worked on modeling population growth using Ordinary Differential Equations (ODEs). More specifically, I studied tumor cell growth through an ODE-based model.

In my master’s degree, I worked in collaboration with the Neurophysics Group (GNF) at IFGW. There, we studied brain networks constructed from human fMRI images. In this project, we represented the brain as a Graph and analyzed its structural properties.

In my Ph.D., I changed my research topic, and since then, my work has focused on the Distance Geometry Problem and its applications to protein structure determination using Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR).

After finishing my Ph.D., I moved to Paris and started a postdoc at LIX, in collaboration with the Laboratoire de Physique et Chimie Théoriques (LPCT) at the Université de Lorraine (UL), in Nancy (eastern France, close to Strasbourg), where I stayed for 1.5 years. It was a great chance to work closer to real-world problems, and I got hands-on with large-scale simulations at the EXPLOR center mesocenter for high-performance computing.

Now, for my second postdoc, I’m back at IMECC/UNICAMP – and still having fun with math and molecules – and constantly debugging code.

In the menu above, you’ll find more details about my academic and professional journey. On the right, you’ll find links to my contact info and academic profiles. Don’t hesitate to reach out!

Thanks for stopping by – and feel free to say hi!