Program Information

PDRI-DevLab hosts several postdoctoral research fellows who work on a wide range of international development topics and projects. PDRI-DevLab also participates in university-wide postdoctoral programs, such as the Provost’s Postdoctoral Fellowship. PDRI-DevLab’s Postdoctoral Fellowship provides young scholars with valuable time to advance their own research agenda, while also contributing to PDRI-DevLab’s research projects.

Postdoctoral fellows play a key role in PDRI-DevLab’s intellectual community. They take part and present in PDRI-DevLab’s academic year seminar series, plan conferences, and participate in feedback workshops. They also serve as mentors to PDRI-DevLab-affiliated graduate students and other staff.

Postdoctoral fellowship opportunities are announced on our jobs page as they arise.

Current PDRI-DevLab postdoctoral fellows

Carolina Torreblanca, 2024-2025
Carolina’s research explores the political economy of crime and its punishment, with a regional focus on Mexico and Latin America and an emphasis on political methodology. Carolina received her doctorate in Political Science from New York University in August 2024. Before graduate school, she was the director of Data Analysis at the Mexican NGO Data Cívica. She earned a B.A. in Political Science and a B.A. in International Relations from ITAM.

Former PDRI-DevLab Postdoctoral Fellows

Carlos Schmidt-Padilla, 2022-2024

Carlos is a former Postdoctoral Fellow. He is now an Assistant Professor of Public Policy at the Goldman School of Public Policy of the University of California – Berkeley. His research interests encompass the political economy of development of Latin America and of sub-Saharan Africa. In particular, he studies questions concerning crime, human capital, migration, and policing under weak institutional settings. Carlos received his doctorate in Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley, in August 2021, where he was also a Research Associate at the Center on the Politics of Development.

Diego Romero, 2022-23
Diego is a former Postdoctoral Fellow. He is currently an assistant professor in the Department of Political Science at Utah State University, but will be joining the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin in the Summer of 2025. Diego is interested in issues of governance, in particular corruption and accountability, and the interface between civil society, democratic backsliding, and digital media. His second major research interest is in the application of big data analytics to digital media to study the interface between corruption, civil society and democratic backsliding. As an original contributor to the Machine Learning for Peace Project (MLP), Diego applies the latest machine learning techniques to create and analyze an unprecedented high-frequency dataset of civic space events.

Roya Talibova, 2022-23
Roya is currently a Sultan Qaboos bin Said of Oman Assistant Professor of Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School. Roya’s research and teaching address a variety of topics related to political violence and its long-run effects on political economy and development, with a special emphasis on the broader Eurasian region. Her dissertation studies combat motivation in authoritarian regimes. Specifically, she examines why ordinary civilians support an autocrat’s war-making efforts in the aftermath of repression and marginalization, and how wartime experiences affect repressed citizens’ post-conflict behavior. Her dissertation work is part of a larger substantive research agenda that seeks to understand the short- and long-run effects of political violence on the political and economic development of states.

Liana Eustacia Reyes, Provost’s Postdoctoral Fellow, 2022-23
Liana is currently an Assistant Professor of International Relations and the Founder and Director of the Law and Conflict research lab (LAC) at Purdue University. Liana’s work examines the determinants and consequences of conflict resolution mechanisms. To date, her research has been generously funded by the National Science Foundation and Rice University. It has also been published in the Journal of Conflict Resolution, International Studies Quarterly, and Studies in Conflict and Terrorism.

Stephanie Zonszein
PDRI-DevLab Postdoctoral Fellow, 2020-2022
Assistant Professor of Political Science, UC Berkeley.