María Laura is a Peruvian sociologist (PUCP, 2010) and a Ph.D. candidate at Syracuse University. She also holds a master of public administration from the same university (De Sardon-Glass Fellow, 2014-2015).

María Laura’s research experience includes different topics such as the evaluation of education policies in urban and rural areas of Peru, the relation between education and citizenship, among others. She has also held executive positions in organizations working towards the promotion of evidence-based policymaking and gender equity in academia.

These experiences, next to a brief stage within the Peruvian bureaucracy, triggered María Laura’s interest in studying the political and economic obstacles that social policies face on the road to a successful implementation.

Driven by such concern, her research agenda focuses on the political economy of social policies in Peru, which she studies from a comparative perspective and paying attention to elements such as business power and policy legacies. More specifically, in her dissertation, Maria Laura analyzes to what extent the power of businesses and their influence in policymaking processes brings limitations in healthcare access and quality in this and in other Latin American countries.

Comparative political economy of social policies, business power and social policies, Peru, Latin America