Eugenia Aguirre is a Ph.D. student in Political Science at the University of Notre Dame, specializing in Comparative Politics, and a Ph.D. fellow at the Kellogg Institute for International Studies. Her research examines democracy and local governance in Central America, with a focus on how local authorities and institutions interact with processes of democratic backsliding. She is also interested in gender and youth’s political representation. She holds an M.A. in Latin American Studies from the Roger Thayer Stone Center for Latin American Studies at Tulane University, and a B.A. and Licenciatura in Political Science from the University of Costa Rica (UCR). Before graduate school, Eugenia worked at the intersection of research, teaching, and public policy in Costa Rica.