Maria Rita holds a bachelor’s and a master’s degree in biology from the University of São Paulo. Since her bachelor’s years, she was interest in archaeology and anthropolgy. She joined a research team that studied human remains from South American archaeological sites and did an undergraduate research on dental anthropology. During her master’s, she shifted focus towards human evolution and wrote a thesis about the evolution of the human pelvis, while working in a paleoanthropology laboratory. In 2023, she started her PhD in dental anthropology as part of the ERC project REVIVE, at the University of Tübingen. Her research focus on dental paleopathologies found in human remains from South American archaeological sites, located in the high lands of the Andes, the pacific coast and also hinterlands of Brazil. Her PhD project aims to understand how the early inhabitants of the American continent adapted their subsistence strategies to different environments.