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�³����� was growing up in Brazil, she told people she wanted to be a teacher and an engineer when she grew up.��

“My brother and sister made fun of me, saying that those don’t go together,” says Peixoto, an associate professor in the  (ECE), and an affiliate faculty member with the .��“My mom never finished her first year of college, so it was not clear that anyone in our family would go to college.” 

But Peixoto was determined. She went to a vocational-technical school instead of a traditional high school and became a technician in electronics and robotics, working with five engineers. “When I disagreed with them, or they asked me to do things that I thought were wrong, they said, ‘Unless you have a bachelor’s degree, you can’t call any shots.’” 

So Peixoto went on to get an undergraduate degree, PhD, then conduct research at the �鶹���� of Bonn in Germany as well as Stanford �鶹���� before coming to Mason in 2004 as a post-doc in the physics department. She joined the  in 2006 as an assistant professor in ECE.��

Now Peixoto is living her childhood dream, combining her love for teaching and engineering while mentoring young women, like herself, who had to overcome obstacles to become engineers.��“I prefer to help people who have difficulties navigating the academic world,” says Peixoto, who won Mason’s Teaching Excellence Award in 2015.��

As a supervisor for the , she meets with minority students, sharing stories of her journey, providing guidance on job searches and applying to graduate school, and tips on finding a lab to conduct research while an undergraduate.�� 

She has worked with students she met in classes, in the hallway, through other professors, during her presentations to middle and high school students, and at Mason’s .��

Peixoto estimates she has mentored hundreds of students over the years, often supervising their research projects.��Currently, she is overseeing nine independent research projects led by high school and undergraduate students, three ECE senior design team projects, as well as three research projects in her , which is affiliated with both the ECE and Bioengineering departments and is part of the .  

Her high school, undergraduate, and graduate students perform team-based projects on assistive technology, wearable embedded systems, and neural implants.��

 “One of the things I’ve learned is that our best students bloom if you give them freedom,” Peixoto says.��

For one of her funded research projects, a graduate student is creating a device that uses wireless signals to detect people’s heart rate and breath behind walls of rubble.��“It could be used to detect a person who was buried because of an earthquake or in a war zone,” she says.��

The U.S.��Air Force is funding the project.��“There’s a lot of math behind it and hardware/software development to be done to make it work, but I am hopeful it will be really useful.” 

For another project, she’s working with an epidemiologist to develop a portable robot that can collect ticks, which will help for research on tick-borne diseases.��

In another, she’s working with a Social Work professor at Mason on virtual-reality tools to help people who are recovering from addiction. Her expertise here is on analyzing brain signals and the physiological state of the user during exposure to triggers.��

She is also a co-investigator on a prestigious  of nearly $3 million from the  to cross-train graduate students over the next five years.�� 

Peixoto appreciates the flexibility she has at Mason to wear many hats.��“I have the perfect balance of how much I can interact with students, how much I can mentor them, and I can allow them to do whatever research they want.��

“After students leave Mason, they often keep in touch and let me know how their professional and personal lives are going,” she says.��“Their stories become part of mine, they always have their experiences at Mason impact them, and it is gratifying for me to see and be part of that.”