I am an international political economist and Lecturer (Assistant Professor) 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.

In May 2027, I will move onto a three-year Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship at OSGA.

My research straddles 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 won a John Fell Oxford University Press Award and a Leverhulme Fellowship, 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 peer-reviewed work is published or forthcoming in Global Policy, International Journal of Health Policy and Management, Drugs: Education, Prevention and Policy, and Bulletin of Latin American Research. I have also written op-eds for Foreign Policy, The Washington Post, Folha de São Paulo, and O Globo.

In 2026, I was honoured to receive a University of Oxford Award for Excellence and a Teaching Excellence Award from the University's Social Sciences Division.

I hold a PhD in Politics and International Studies from the University of Cambridge and an MPhil in Development Studies from Oxford. Before entering academic life, I served for thirteen years in the Brazilian Diplomatic Corps, working under four presidential administrations.