Pinto worked with David Rand on his master's thesis (1989) that studied the work of Mitchell Feigenbaum and Dennis Sullivan on scaling functions and he went on to a PhD (1991) on the universality features of other classes of maps that form the boundary between order and chaos [REF].
During this time Pinto met a number of the leaders in dynamical systems, notably Dennis Sullivan and Maurício Peixoto, and this had a great impact on his career.