Melissa Severino de Oliveira

Class of 2024

Advisor: Beatriz Magaloni

Solange Melissa Severino de Oliveira was born and raised in Brazil, in the cities of Manaus and São Paulo. She is a coterm student majoring in Political Science, with a minor in Feminist, Gender and Sexuality Studies. Melissa is particularly passionate about development politics and aims to work with public policy towards gender equality. 

She is currently writing a thesis under the Center for Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law, in which she aims to explore the influence that gender policy preferences have in the voting decisions of Brazilian women. She also co-founded and co-directed Latin American Voices in Politics, a series of conferences about the future of public policy in Latin America. Professionally, Melissa has mostly explored the public sector and research, having worked in the Secretariat of Education of the State of São Paulo, at the Women's Institute of the Federal Government of Mexico, as well as a research assistance for the Poverty, Violence and Governance Lab and the Polarization and Social Change Lab.