Beatriz Silva da Costa

My name is Beatriz, and I grew up in the heart of the Amazon region of Brazil — a place that often felt invisible to the government. "It is what it is, Bia" was the phrase I heard most growing up. That answer never satisfied me.

So instead of accepting it, I started changing things. At home, that meant co-founding React & Change, a youth-led nonprofit focused on social impact. Abroad, it meant becoming a Brazilian Youth Ambassador Delegate through the U.S. State Department and volunteering with UNICEF. Those early experiences didn't just shape my career — they shaped the question I've been chasing ever since: why do the people who have the power to fight corruption so often choose not to?

That question has taken me across countries and institutions. I studied Social Sciences and Political Science at the Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG), worked inside Brazil's Comptroller General of the Union tracing the origins of oversight institutions, and eventually came to the United States as one of 20 Lemann Foundation Fellows selected from nearly 900 applicants. I'm a member of the Lemann Foundation's Rede de Líderes, a leadership network connecting people working to build a more just and developed Brazil. I'm now a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Virginia and a Pre-Doctoral Fellow at Georgetown University.

My research uses Latin America as a lens to study questions with global implications: how political institutions shape anti-corruption reform, what makes government contracting competitive and transparent, and why oversight bodies succeed or fail. The methods I use — linking campaign finance data, firm ownership networks, and millions of procurement transactions with causal inference and computational text analysis — are designed to travel across contexts.

Along the way, I've built things I'm proud of beyond my research: an R package that helps scholars worldwide access electoral data, a teaching practice I love, and a photography habit that reminds me to look up from the data every once in a while.