Samanta Varela Castro

Post-Doctoral Research Fellow

Samanta Varela Castro is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow specializing in communication and technology for flood awareness. Her research focuses on public policy, crisis management, and the intersection of technology and governance. Dr. Varela has published articles using perishable data and contributing to theory on the impact of COVID-19 on public officials in Mexico. Her current work seeks to understand techniques to increase flood awareness in underserved communities in the United States. Her work has been published in the Journal of Applied Communication Research, Public Administration Review, Review of Public Personnel Administration, and the Journal of Comparative Policy Analysis: Research and Practice.

Samanta holds a Ph.D. in Public Policy from the Center for Economics Research and Teaching (CIDE) in Mexico, where her dissertation focused on uncertainty communication during long-duration crises. She was a visiting Ph. D. at the Institute of Security and Global Affairs of Leiden University. Her professional experience includes roles as a Visiting Professor at CIDE and a Teaching Fellow at the University of the Valley of Mexico.

Samanta has received awards such as the Future Shocks Case Studies Challenge Grant by the IBM Center for the Business of Government for collaborative work and the Egregious Teaching Excellence Award from the University of the Valley of Mexico. She has served on the Scientific Committee for the International Conference on Comparative Public Policy and is a Board Member of the Public Administration Theory Network.