Giovana Girardi did not set out to become an environmental reporter. I only know this because I asked her.

A chance assignment investigating the suicides of dozens of Brazilian agricultural workers sent Girardi down a path of writing about science and environmental issues for many years and, this year, brought her to study at MIT.

In 2002 while working in one of her first journalism jobs, Girardi spent two months digging into the deaths of workers who toiled in some of Brazil’s strawberry and tobacco fields, pouring over the potential links between depression and the pesticides they used on crops. After her story was published in the science magazine Galileu, more Brazilian media piled onto the topic and government officials eventually tightened their guidelines for the handling of the pesticides in question.

For Girardi, that story was the start of a career path in investigating and explaining science, and most recently the science of climate change, to the Brazilian public. Today, she covers environmental issues for one of Brazil’s largest newspapers, O Estado de S. Paulo, and is spending this year digging into science as a Knight Science Journalism fellow at MIT.

I learned about her first big journalistic investigation and her motivations for science reporting by talking with her. I would not have discovered the subtleties and provocations online, certainly not with my limited ability to navigate anything in Portuguese and the limitations of Google translate.

First, to clear up the Internet’s confusion: This Giovana Girardi is not the buxom blonde Brazilian fingernail artist with a collection of viral youtube videos and wildly decorated nails. Though that Giovana Girardi does seem to have some scientific interest, appearing in one photo supporting polio research, this one is much more serious and grounded in explaining complex issues.

A few more facts I would not have discerned from simply digging and translating on the web: Girardi grew up in partly in Sao Paolo, then spent her teenage years in a much smaller city, moving back to back to the metropolis for journalism school. Her mother and sister are both teachers, her father a bank manager. She expected to become an education reporter, and she was for a time, starting out covering schools for her first job. Her work at Galileu and that initial big investigation into pesticides refocused her on science writing, which in turn led her to several more positions and prestige in editing and writing for different publications in Brazil.

Her resume is probably traceable online given the time and language skills, but the motivations behind her moves and career choices would be much less so.

If I didn’t know her I probably wouldn’t have figured out that she and her husband have been together for 18 years, but only married last year before coming to the US. They had a church wedding. And I might not know that he was also a journalist, a writer covering politics and craft beer.

It would have taken a very long time to discern without question that she’s 38. I simply asked her.

Given that Girardi speaks and writes fluent English, I’d have no reason to guess this is her first time living abroad. And without having spoken with her in person, I wouldn’t have noticed the tiny gold locket she wears – a gift from her sister containing photos of her family to remind her of home while she’s far away.

I do know from the Internet that while here at MIT, she has written about robots for this class and taken other classes on climate science and politics. And she herself has perhaps the best description of what she’s hoping to accomplish this year.

In a profile for MIT’s website, she wrote about her work, “I used to think that stories about climate change could have a strong impact on the public and in politics, because this is, at least for me, the most important subject of our era. We all will be affected on some level by climate change. But I am afraid that we journalists have been losing relevance in this area. I don’t know why that is, but I have the impression that either people are getting tired of hearing the same catastrophic news over and over, or they (specially American and South American readers) just don’t feel personally threatened. Either way, I think we need new strategies to communicate the importance of this dramatic issue. One big step in that direction is to understand the science and the politics of climate change better. That is one of my goals here.”