Natalia Garbiras-Diaz received her PhD in Political Science from the University of California, Berkeley, in 2021, she is a Research Associate at the Center on the Politics of Development. She holds an M.A. in Economics from the University of Los Andes (Colombia). Before receiving her PhD, she worked at the World Bank, the Observatory of Democracy, and Colombia's National Planning Department.

Her main research interests are in comparative politics and the political economy of development, focusing on corruption, public goods provision, and accountability in Latin America. She also studies the formation of citizen and ex-combatant attitudes and their role in stabilizing peace in post-conflict settings. In the manuscript of her dissertation, she explores the information and institutional environments that pave the way for outsider candidates' rise and success. As a Max Weber Fellow, she will continue working on this book project.

Natalia has experience teaching quantitative research methods at UC Berkeley at the graduate and undergraduate levels. She has also been an instructor at the EGAP Learning Days. She has also taught courses in Comparative Politics and on Clientelism and corruption.