Beatriz Silva da Costa

I am a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Politics at the University of Virginia and a Pre-Doctoral Fellow at Georgetown University. I study political institutions and public governance, with a particular focus on anti-corruption policy, government contracting, and oversight bodies in Latin America. I specialize in quantitative methods and use causal inference, computational text analysis, and large-scale administrative data in my research. I am also a co-author of electionsBR, an R package that provides scholars worldwide with access to Brazilian electoral data.

Prior to UVA, I studied Social Sciences and Political Science at the Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG), where I also worked inside Brazil's Comptroller General of the Union (CGU) tracing the origins of federal oversight institutions. I came to the United States as one of 20 Lemann Foundation Fellows selected from nearly 900 applicants. I am a member of the Lemann Foundation's Rede de Líderes, a leadership network connecting people working to build a more just and equitable Brazil.

I hold an M.A. in Political Science from the Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG), where my thesis examined the institutional origins of Brazil's federal oversight system. I also worked inside Brazil's Comptroller General of the Union (CGU) as a researcher tracing the development of internal control institutions. Before academia, I co-founded React & Change, a youth-led nonprofit focused on social impact in the Brazilian Amazon, served as a Brazilian Youth Ambassador Delegate through the U.S. Department of State.

My research has been supported by the Lemann Foundation, the Mercatus Center at George Mason University (Carl Menger Fellowship), the UVA Center for Global Inquiry and Innovation, the College of Arts & Sciences' Quantitative Collaborative, the Institute for Humane Studies, the Quandt Fund for International Research, and the Brazilian National Council for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq).