Fernanda Souza

I started out in executive secretariat work. Sitting next to the people who decide is where I learned to see the mechanics of decision-making: who is at the table, what reaches it and what never does.

That path led me to corporate governance, which is precisely the discipline of organising those mechanics.

Nutrition came in through another door and ran in parallel for a while. I started studying it out of personal interest, for my own development, with no idea that it would ever meet my work. The two met when I studied Culture of Health at Harvard Online.

That is where the link became clear, and the link is decision-making. Nutrition is one of the pillars of better decisions, and nourishment is not only about eating. It is everything that enters the mind through the eyes, the ears and the mouth. To nourish is also to feel, and sensation and emotion sit inside every decision.

That question brought me to PPGOLD at the Federal University of Paraná, to research how to implement projects that genuinely improve organisational decision-making.

Today I work on the border between governance and health. Brazil's NR‑1 standard brought into the corporate agenda something that had always been there without any structure around it: psychosocial risk. It is not solved by a wellbeing campaign. It is solved by decision process, evidence and clearly assigned accountability. And neuroscience belongs in that equation because decision-making is human behaviour before it is a flow on an org chart.