He holds a degree in Electrical Engineering from the Federal University of Santa Maria (1987), a master?s degree in Electrical Engineering from the State University of Campinas (1990) and a doctorate in Electrical Engineering from the State University of Campinas (1993). He did a PhD internship at the Centre de Recherche sur les Transports- CRT in Montreal - Canada (1991-1992). He completed a Post-Doctoral Internship at the Computational Intelligence Centre of De Montfort University - Leicester - UK (2014-2015). He was Rector of UFSM (2009-2013), Vice Rector of UFSM (2005-2009), Director of the Technology Center (2003-2005) and Deputy Director of the Technology Center (1999-2003). President of the Brazilian Society of Operational Research (2017-2021). He currently teaches at PPG in Production Engineering and PPG Computer Science at UFSM. He is a full professor at the Federal University of Santa Maria, in the Department of Applied Computing of the Technology Center. He has experience in the area of Production Engineering, working mainly in the following subjects: combinatorial optimization, heuristics and meta-heuristics, matheuristics, routing and sequencing problems, Scheduling and tabu search.