About me

I am currently based at the University of Manchester, where I work as a Lecturer in Policing in the Department of Criminology.

As a quantitative social scientist, I work with topics related to criminology and sociology. I am curious about the consequences of police misconduct and aggressive policing tactics, particularly in terms of people’s cultural orientation towards the law and the legal institutions. Overall, I use survey, admin, police, and census data and other kinds of data to investigate the extent to which people lose faith in legal authority when they are repeatedly exposed to police brutality and injustice, especially in high-crime contexts, and I am particularly motivated to explore the degree to which this relationship is causal. Topics in which I am particularly interested include the legitimacy of the law and the legal institutions, the overpolicing-underpolicing paradox, legal cynicism, procedural justice theory, legal socialisation, police misconduct, aggressive policing methods, exposure to violence, neighbourhood effects, and criminal justice policy. In some previous and ongoing studies, I used longitudinal survey data to investigate the extent to which police contact led to changes in legal attitudes and the degree to which police misconduct shaped public attitudes towards legal authority, with particular focus on high-crime contexts such as the city of São Paulo, Brazil.

I am very interested in social research methods. Most of my research relies upon survey data to measure constructs related to legal attitudes and I am particularly interested in panel survey designs to model changes in public opinion. My main methodological interests in quantitative social science include panel data modelling, causal inference with observational data, measurement, multilevel modelling, spatial data models, and R programming. I am generally keen on teaching topics related to research design, quantitative research methods, and statistical software.

I received my PhD in Social Research Methods from the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) in 2021, my MA in Sociology from the University of São Paulo (USP) in 2016, and my BA in Social Sciences also from the University of São Paulo (USP) in 2013. Prior to joining the University of Surrey, I was a Postdoctoral Researcher in the Centre for Social Investigation and a Research Fellow of Nuffield College in the University of Oxford. During my PhD years, I was an Associate Lecturer (Teaching) in Quantitative Research Methods and Data Analysis at University College London (UCL) from September 2019 to June 2021. Prior to my doctoral studies, I was a Research Assistant and then Researcher at the Centre for the Study of Violence of the University of São Paulo (NEV-USP), where I am still a Research Affiliate. In 2015, I was a Visiting Scholar at the International Institute for the Sociology of Law in Oñati, Basque Country/Spain.

I am also a tennis fanatic, a coffee enthusiast, an engaged cyclist, a vegetarian food lover, and am always keen on chatting about those and other topics at anytime. Feel free to drop me a line!