Sara Niedzwiecki is an Assistant Professor of Politics at UC Santa Cruz. Her research focuses on comparative welfare states, multilevel governance, and Latin America. She is interested in how social policies are both formed and implemented and in the territorial structure of government across countries.

The 2019 Hellman Fellowship enabled her to move her research in a new direction with a project on immigration and social policy in Latin America. She hired and trained a team of five graduate and undergraduate students from UC Santa Cruz, Argentina and Costa Rica who analyzed policies, official documents, laws, and institutional communications to measure the degree of inclusiveness of immigrants in three Latin American countries. She also conducted exploratory field-research in Argentina, where she interviewed over forty policy-makers and activists who influenced social and immigration policy reforms. This preliminary research better positioned her to become a Fellow at the Kellogg Institute for International Studies at the University of Notre Dame in 2020-2021 where she will advance her new research agenda.