Welcome! I am an Assistant Professor in the Sociology Department at the University of Michigan. I received my PhD in Sociology at Columbia University, as well as a MA in Sociology and Anthropology from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro and a BA in Economics from Puc-Rio.
I am a political sociologist who studies knowledge, power, and inequality in Latin America. I have three main areas of research. First, I investigate the critical role that policy knowledge plays in shaping how states design, implement, and evaluate social policies. Second, I examine the enduring effects that state institutions have on the reproduction of inequalities. Third, I focus on racial inequality as both an ideological construction and a realm of action. Across all my research, I draw on a wide array of methods, from in-depth interviews and archival work to statistical analysis of longitudinal national surveys. My work has received seven awards from ASA’s Comparative Historical Sociology, Sociology of Development and Science, Knowledge and Technology sections, as well LASA’s Brazil and Economics & Politics section. My new research projects build on contemporary changes in Latin America’s social protection regime to ask new questions about the relationship between welfare policies, citizenship, and inequality from the viewpoint of societal actors, and not just the state. You can have access to my publications here.