Meet María Laura Veramendi García, 2018 Fund for Latino Scholarship Recipient

María Laura Veramendi García is a Peruvian sociologist (PUCP, 2010) and a third year PhD student at Syracuse University, studying comparative politics and public policy. She also holds an MPA from the same university (De Sardon-Glass Fellow, 2014-2015). María Laura’s research experience has focused on  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 policy-making and gender equity in academia. These experiences, along with a brief stage within the Peruvian bureaucracy, triggered María Laura’s interest in studying the political obstacles that public policies face on the road to a successful implementation. Driven by such concern, her dissertation will focus on the politics of welfare policies in Latin America from a comparative perspective. In this project, she will pay particular attention to the effects of past policies and political events in later policy-making processes. With support from the Fund for Latino Scholarship, María Laura will attend the 2018 APSA Annual Meeting for the first time. She considers this to be a great opportunity to meet and learn from scholars working on topics that are close to her research interests and to enhance skills and knowledge that are crucial for her next steps. During the meeting, she will also benefit from participating in discussions on topics that are highly relevant for her personal experience, such as the challenges of being a member of the Latino community working in the US academic environment.


Learn more about the Fund for Latino Scholarship.