Dr de Felippes has focused most of his career studying the mechanism of RNA interference in plants, which plays a critical role in many physiological processes, from development to defense against viruses. He completed his bachelor’s and master’s degrees at the Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS), Porto Alegre, Brazil. He then joined the Max Planck Institute for Developmental Biology (Tübingen, Germany) as a Ph.D. student, and later worked as a postdoctoral fellow at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich, Switzerland.

In 2017, Dr de Felippes joined the group of Prof. Peter Waterhouse at the Centre for Agriculture and the Bioeconomy (CAB) - QUT, as a Senior Research Associate. Since then, he has been engaged in research involving the RNA interference pathway, plant response to abiotic stress, protection against virus, gene regulation, and genomics.