I am a Lecturer in Latin American Studies at the Oxford School of Global and Area Studies (OSGA), University of Oxford. I am also Head of the Brazilian Studies Programme, and Course Director for the MPhil and MSc degrees at OSGA's Latin American Centre.

My research moves across two interconnected lines of inquiry. The first concerns the politics of drugs in Latin America — how social movements and civil society organizations have worked to disassemble, circumvent, or reform a century-old prohibition framework; how regulatory agencies are designed to resist exactly this kind of pressure, and how organized groups manage to pierce through regardless; and what the recent wave of drug policy experimentation tells us about the future of global drug governance. A new project, for which I have recently won a John Fell Oxford University Press Award, examines why prohibition has endured for as long as it has — what political, economic, and institutional forces sustain a framework that demonstrably fails on its own terms, and whose critics have spent decades attempting to dismantle.

The second line of work concerns foreign policy. Focusing on Brazil, I investigate its historic commitment to non-alignment, its relationship with the Global South, and its evolving posture toward liberal international norms.

My writing — both peer-reviewed and public-facing — has appeared in academic journals and in outlets including Global Policy, Drugs: Education, Prevention and Policy, Bulletin of Latin American Research, Foreign Policy, The Washington Post, Folha de São Paulo, and O Globo.

I hold a PhD in Politics and International Studies from Cambridge and an MPhil in Development Studies from Oxford. Before entering academic life, I spent thirteen years as a diplomat in the Brazilian Foreign Service, serving under four presidential administrations.