Araujo was born and raised in
Rio de Janeiro,
Brazil. She did her undergraduate studies in Brazil, completing a degree in mathematics in 1998 from the
Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro. She earned her PhD in 2004 at
Princeton University, where her dissertation, supervised by
János Kollár, was titled
The Variety of Tangents to Rational Curves. She is currently a researcher at the
Instituto Nacional de Matemática Pura e Aplicada in Brazil (IMPA), and the only woman (as of 2018) on the permanent research staff at IMPA. She is also a Simons Associate at the
Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP). She is the vice-president of the Committee for Women in Mathematics at the
International Mathematical Union. During and after her PhD, Araujo developed techniques related to Japanese mathematician
Shigefumi Mori's proposed theory of
rational curves of minimal degree, which she published in 2008. == Recognition ==