Lucia Rapp Py-Daniel

Lucia Helena Rapp Py-Daniel was born in 1956 in Rio de Janeiro in Brazil. She got her Biology degree in 1977 at the Universidade de Brasília (UnB) and, a few years later in 1984, her Master by the Instituto Nacional de Pesquisas da Amazônia (INPA). Later then, in 1997, she received her PhD from The University of Arizona (Tucson, AZ, US) in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology.

Already in 1976 she became interested and started working on systematics of freshwater fishes, mainly catfishes, and deeply fell in love with the Loricariidae since then. She is living in the Amazon region since 1978 and has experienced the never-ending thrill of traveling in the Amazon rivers and studying the loricariid diversity (and other families), since then.

Lucia would never change this working place for any other.

She has been teaching in the Graduate School Program at INPA since 1990 and advises students in taxonomy, systematics and phylogeny of freshwater fishes. She has a great interest in understanding the real diversity of loricariids (taxonomy), the relationships within the Loricariidae (phylogenetic systematics) and how these fishes are distributed over the continent (biogeography).

Lucia already described four genera and 13 new species within the Loricariidae. And there are still much more to be described.