Since she was a child, her parents used to take her and her siblings to the wooded areas near São Paulo, which helped her to become interested in zoology, especially small animals.
[1] After finishing High School, she spent six months in Rio de Janeiro with an uncle who was a physician and returned home interested in studying medicine.
Her father did not approve the idea, considering it an inappropriate career for a woman, and suggested her to study natural history and so she did.
In 1951 she and Froehlich started their doctoral studies at the Universidade de São Paulo together, having Ernst Marcus as their advisor.
Marcus suggested that they should work on the taxonomy of land planarians, since it was a poorly studied but highly diverse group in the region.