Galetti got his Ph.D. at
University of Cambridge in 1996. In Cambridge, Galetti was supervised by the primatologist David J. Chivers. At this time, Galetti met a young primatologist
Carlos A. Peres who influenced him to study
keystone species instead of
primates. He decides to test the concept of keystone species in tropical forests for the first time, comparing the abundance of fruit-eating birds and mammals in areas with a dense population of palms
Euterpe edulis with neighbouring sites without palms. During their last year in Cambridge, he spent a week in
Seville with
Pedro Jordano, which changed his life. Jordano was a young scientist expert in frugivory and
seed dispersal who took Galetti to
Sierra de Cazorla and taught him about the Mediterranean ecosystems. Before coming back to
Brazil, Galetti's moved to
Barito Ulu project in
Kalimantan,
Indonesia. He decided to spend a year studying for the first time seed dispersal by
hornbills and
sunbears, but after 3 months, a civil war erupted in Indonesia and he decided to return to Brazil. He was one of the first ecologists to study
toucans and
hornbills in the wild. After four months in
Borneo, he moved back to
Brazil and became a professor at
São Paulo State University in 1998, where he works at the Department of Biodiversity. He was a visiting scientist at
Spanish National Research Council in
Seville in 2007 and Thinker Professor at
Stanford University from 2008 to 2009 at Center for Latin American Studies. During his period at Stanford, he was associated with Professor
Rodolfo Dirzo, the father of
defaunation ideas. In 2017, he was Visiting Faculty at Aarhus Universitet,
Denmark, where he collaborated intensively with Dr. Jens-Christian Svenning. From 2020 to 2022, he was an associate professor at the University of Miami, FL, USA, and is a courtesy Associate Professor at
Florida International University. Galetti was the pioneer in publishing about
rewilding, particularly after visiting
Kruger National Park in South Africa. He was the first to discuss that most of the Brazilian
cerrado is a
Pleistocene megafauna defaunated ecosystem. Galetti has written on
ecology for several journals including
Science,
PLOS ONE and
Biological Conservation and his contribution has been much debated by public media. Galetti has published more than 220 papers and was the Editor of
Biological Conservation for Latin America In 2013, his paper was Highly Recommended by the
Faculty of 1000. In 2019, 2020, 2021,2022,2023, and 2024, he was considered one of the top 1% of most influential scientists in the world
Clarivate Analytics. Galetti also received the Jabuti Acadêmico Award and ABEU Award for his book "Um Naturalista no Antropoceno" published by Editora Unesp. ==Selected publications ==