Dr Ávila has a PhD in Earth Sciences (2011) from the Australian National University (ANU). She held postdoctoral appointments at the University of São Paulo from 2011 to 2013 and ANU from 2013 to 2014. Between 2013 and 2014, she was a Postdoctoral Fellow under a Research in Business grant from the Australia Department of Innovation. During that period, she worked in partnership with the RSES SHRIMP team and the Australian Scientific Instruments (ASI) scientists in a range of subjects related to improvements in performance of measurements of stable isotopes in the SHRIMP ion microprobe instruments. As a Postdoctoral Fellow (from March 2013 to May 2014) and as a Research Fellow (from June 2014 to February 2021) at RSES (ANU), Dr Ávila provided strategic advice and support to a wide range of multidisciplinary research projects, from application of stable isotopes to constrain the evolution of the early solar system, atmospheric conditions in the Archean, fluid migration in petroleum systems, and continental weathering. In 2021, Dr Ávila was a Research Fellow at the Griffith Centre for Social and Cultural Research (GCSCR) at Griffith University. She provided technical expertise in the acquisition and interpretation of in situ measurements of oxygen isotopes obtained in primate teeth. Dr Ávila is currently a Research Fellow at School of Earth and Environmental Sciences at University of Queensland helping the setup of the new SHRIMP ion microprobe laboratory at SEES.
Dr Ávila research centres around the application of ion microprobes to the understanding of the isotopic nature of terrestrial and extraterrestrial materials at the microscale. In particular, she is interested in new analytical developments and applications that extend the use of in situ isotopic measurements in earth sciences, planetary sciences, and biological anthropology. Current areas of interest include: (1) environmental and biological evolutions on early Earth, and their influences on the chemical evolution of the atmosphere and oceans, (2) factors influencing isotopic fractionation (mass-dependent and mass-independent fractionation) associated to sulfur and oxygen isotopes in terrestrial and extraterrestrial materials, (3) sulfur and oxygen isotopic signatures of biological processes, and (4) application of in situ stable isotopes and trace elements analyses in the study of climate seasonality, dietary patterns, and human mobility within the field of biological anthropology.