Beatriz Magaloni is Professor of Political Science and Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute at Stanford University. She is also an affiliated faculty at the Stanford Center on Global Poverty and Development. Her research interests fall into four themes: the study of authoritarian regimes; electoral and distributive politics; “traditional” forms of governance and non-state provision of public goods; and violence, public security and human rights. Much of her research has focused on Latin America.

She is the founding director of the Poverty, Violence, and Governance Lab. The Povgov Lab engages researchers and students — undergraduates, M.A. and Ph.D. candidates — from the fields of political science, education, economics, international policy studies, and engineering with the goal of finding solutions to problems of lawlessness and violence.

She is the author of Voting for Autocracy (2006, Cambridge University Press –winner of the Leon D. Epstein Outstanding Book Award for the best book written in the previous two years on parties and elections and the Best Book Award from the American Political Science Association’s Comparative Democratization Section). She is also the author of The Political Logic of Poverty Relief: Electoral Strategies and Social Policy in Mexico (2016, Cambridge University Press, co-authored with Alberto Diaz-Cayeros and Federico Estévez).

Her research has appeared in the American Journal of Political Science, Journal of Conflict Resolution, World Development, Comparative Political Studies, Annual Review of Political Science, Latin American Research Review, International Journal of Educational Development, Latin American Politics and Society, International Journal of Public Opinion Research, Journal of Theoretical Politics, and Política y Gobierno.

Beatriz Magaloni received her Ph.D. in political science from Duke University and obtained her Law degree from the Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México (ITAM).

Alberto Díaz-Cayeros is Senior Fellow at the Center on Democracy, Development and Rule of Law (CDDRL) and Director of the Center for Latin American Studies at Stanford University. His research interests include federalism, poverty relief, indigenous governance, the political economy of health, violence, and citizen security in Mexico and Latin America. He is the author of Federalism, Fiscal Authority and Centralization in Latin America (Cambridge, reedited 2016) and coauthor with Federico Estévez and Beatriz Magaloni of The Political Logic of Poverty Relief (Cambridge, 2016), as well as numerous journal articles and book chapters. He is currently working on a project concerning the developmental legacies of colonial rule and governance in indigenous communities in Mexico. In addition, he is the co-PI (with Beatriz Magaloni) of the project Citizen Trust and Evidence-Based Police Accountability and Professionalization in Mexico.

As a Research Associate, Kim Juárez is managing various of the Lab's research projects, including an RCT on gender-based violence in Mexico, a lab-in-the-field experiment on corruption at the US-Mexico border, and mapping organized crime presence in all of Mexico's municipalities. Kim holds a BA in Political Science from the University of Copenhagen and a MA in Latin American Studies, Political Economy Track from Stanford University. Prior to joining POVGOV, Kim worked in the Danish Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Danish Parliament, and Transparency International. 

Sarah is a PhD candidate in Political Science at Stanford University. She is interested in how politically marginalized groups in Latin America and South Asia interact with the state. Currently, her work focuses on the impacts of traditional governance, and improving women’s civic engagement. She received a B.A. (with honors) in Political Science from Columbia University. 

Madison Dalton is a Political Science Ph.D. student at Stanford University. She is interested in identifying strategies for reducing violence perpetrated against politically and socially marginalized individuals. Currently, her work focuses on preventative interventions addressing commercial sexual exploitation and violence against women and children. Prior to Stanford, she worked as a research associate for Mathematica Policy Research and served as a research fellow for the anti-trafficking nonprofit Love Justice International. She holds a B.S. (with honors) in Quantitative Science and Creative Writing from Emory University.

Emily Russell is a PhD student in Political Science studying comparative politics, international relations, and historical methods. She is a Knight-Hennessy scholar and an NSF fellow. Broadly, she is interested in political violence, including repression and militarization in zones of occupation. She is also interested in groups who organize outside of the state apparatus, including anti-colonial movements and modern forms of indigenous sovereignty. Previously, Emily was a research assistant at the University of Michigan and at the Icelandic Human Rights Centre in Reykjavik, Iceland. As a Kathryn Davis Projects for Peace fellow, she co-founded Playwriting for Peace in Pristina, Kosovo, which used applied theatre techniques to prevent security force enlargement. She maintains an affiliation with the Trivedi Centre for Political Data at Ashoka University in India.

Hanna Folsz is a PhD student in Political Science at Stanford University. Her research interests are focused on the political economy of accountability, corruption, and democratic backsliding. She is interested in understanding the determinants of effective democratic accountability, the role of money in politics, and processes of democratic erosion in Latin America and Eastern Europe. Her work applies modern causal inference, text analysis, and geospatial techniques to innovative data sources. She holds a B.A. in Economics and Politics from Durham University and an MSc in Political Science and Political Economy from the London School of Economics. 
 

Ameze “Mez” Belo-Osagie is a Ph.D. student in Political Science studying comparative politics, American politics, and political theory. She is a Knight-Hennessy scholar and an EDGE fellow. Her research focuses on political violence; state capacity; and state-citizen interaction, particularly through the carceral and welfare systems. Currently,she is interested in understanding variations in state capacity, both at the subnational level and between different kinds of government institutions. She holds a B.A., cum laude, in Political Science and African studies from Yale and a J.D. from Harvard Law School. Previously she has worked as a research assistant at a counterinsurgency-focused think tank, as a program assistant at a legal aid clinic focused on torture in Nigerian prisons, as a student-attorney representing criminal defendants in Boston courts, and as the Supreme Court Chair of the Harvard Law Review.
 

Miryea Sturdivant is a Political Science Ph.D. student studying comparative politics and American politics. Her research is broadly concerned with Black and Indigenous social movements, state violence, and racial identity; particularly how they interact to enforce racial hierarchies and repression. She holds a B.A. in Political Science and Social Theory & Practice from the University of Michigan. Prior to Stanford, she worked as a research assistant at the Institute for Social Research and as a production coordinator for ABC News working on election projection models.

Raquel is originally from Puebla, Mexico. She is a graduate of the Bachelor of Public Administration and Political Sciences at the Meritorious Autonomous University of Puebla. Raquel is a former fellow of the United States Embassy in Mexico to participate in the seminar Global Risks: Crime, Security and Governance at Stanford University in 2019. She has worked with the International Congress of Scientific and Technological Research of the Pacific. She has published research articles in magazines such as CULTURAL SURVIVAL, Entre Mundos and Fundación Lasirc.

Bryan Benitez is a junior from Houston, Texas, studying political science and history. His research interests center around questions of identity politics, American foreign policy, and political development in Latin America. He is particularly interested in understanding how race impacts American policymaking and national security strategies, both at home and abroad. 

Alexi Magallanes is an undergraduate majoring in Political Science with a minor in Human Rights. Her research interests are international law, human rights, and political development. Once she graduates from Stanford University she plans on attending law school.

Lauren is an undergraduate student studying computer science, with a concentration in artificial intelligence. Her research interests center around using predictive modeling and machine learning to address the relationship between political development and human rights in Latin America. She is also passionate about defending right and wrong practices when it comes to the use of data and finding ways in which respect for citizens’ privacy and dignity and the use of their data can coexist.

Mari Bigolin Groff is a junior from Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil. They are majoring in Computer Science with an AI track and are broadly interested in AI research, data science, and Latin American history.

Melissa Severino de Oliveira is an undergraduate student  ('24) majoring in Political Science, minoring in Feminist, Gender and Sexuality Studies, and coterming in Latin American Studies. She is an international student from Brazil who is particularly passionate about development politics and aims to work with public policy towards gender equality. Melissa is also currently developing her senior thesis under the Center for Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law.

Carlos is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania's Penn Development Research Initiative. His research leverages applied data science methods to study the political economy of development in Latin America and in sub-Saharan Africa. Specifically, his research focuses on crime, human capital, migration, and policing under weak institutions. Carlos earned his doctorate in Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley, in August 2021.

Jaan Altosaar is the Chief Executive Officer of the One Fact Foundation. The mission of the foundation is to change global health care using open source principles, and Jaan's research focuses on artificial intelligence methods that improve the decisions people make in health and science, and their ability to access information about the incentives that impact their life choices. Previously, he was an Officer of Research at Columbia University Irving Medical Center and completed his Ph.D. in Physics at Princeton University. During his Ph.D., he was a visiting academic at the Center for Data Science at New York University, and worked at Google Brain and DeepMind. His doctoral work was supported by fellowships from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada. Prior to Princeton, Jaan earned his B.Sc. in Mathematics and Physics from McGill University.

Isabella C. Montini is pursuing a Ph.D. in Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley with a focus on Comparative Politics and Methods. Her research focuses on the political economy of development, exploring topics such as violence, distributive politics, and welfare provision by state and “non-state” actors. Her methodological interests include applied causal inference methods. Prior to pursuing her Ph.D., Isabella worked as a research fellow at the Poverty, Violence, and Governance Lab at Stanford University in projects concerning criminal governance, militia expansion, and police violence in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Isabella holds a MA in Latin American Studies with a specialization in Political Economy from Stanford University and a BA in Political Science and Sociology from the Humboldt-University in Berlin.

POVGOV carries out many of its evaluations In Mexico in collaboration with Redes Sociales Para El Desarrollo AC, a non-governmental, not-for-profit civil association formed under the laws of Mexico and doing business as “REDDES”. For almost 20 years, Vicente Vargas has worked—both as a public servant and as a graduate student in Queens' College, Cambridge—on violent social conflicts. His main focus has been to recover the role of the state as the most fundamental social instrument, particularly in poor and violence ridden areas. Vicente has been involved in the attention to diverse conflicts. He supervised the Ministry of Development's response to the Zapatista rebellion in Las Cañadas. He was in charge of the Peace Commissioner's Office in Chiapas. He led the Strategy to alleviate poverty in the 100 poorest municipalities (Estrategia 100x100). From 2008 to 2013, he was in charge of the Program of Governance and Development in the 10 most vulnerable regions of Mexico (167 municipalities). Since 2013, Vicente has been the CEO of Redes Sociales para el Desarrollo (Reddes) and the Observatorio de Desarrollo Regional y Promoción Social (ODP).

As a photographer Anikó Antalfi  is documenting and story telling visually PovGov’s randomized control trial related to gender-based violence in Ecatepec, Mexico. 

She studied Theology and Literature at Babes-Bolyai University, holds a BA in Philosophy and Communication at Babes-Bolyai University and MA in Photography at Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design Budapest. In her artistic practice, she is focusing on themes such as intimacy, representations of the self, boundaries of private and public and transitional states of life. Her work combine constructed images, performative elements and documentary techniques. 

Nicole Canali de Castro is originally from Paraná, Brazil. She is interested in state fragility, political violence, and the impact of non-state actors on peacebuilding and security governance. Nicole holds a BA degree in international relations and a specialization in geopolitics and defense. Her thesis on the impact of private military companies on the fragility indicators in Somalia received honors from the evaluation board. At the Poverty, Violence, and Governance Lab at Stanford University, she worked as a Research Assistant in projects concerning militias in Rio de Janeiro, and Brazilian quilombos. Nicole is also an enthusiast of youth protagonism: in 2018, she represented Brazil on the Youth Ambassadors program, from the United States Government. Since 2019, she serves as a junior adviser on the Business Council of Paraná, contributing to the propagation of sustainability goals and mentoring other young people

Tara is an undergraduate student studying political science, with an emphasis on political economy and development. Born and raised in Monteverde, Costa Rica, Tara is broadly interested in the relationship between citizens and the state in Latin America. In particular, she is interested in understanding how this relationship can be leveraged to alleviate poverty and strengthen democracy in the region. She is currently writing her honors thesis at the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law. Her research examines how low-income individuals in Santiago, Chile, conceptualize their citizenship and how, in turn, they participate in politics and engage with the state.