Research Fellow at the IESP-UERJ, Professor at Unirio. She holds a Ph.D in Political Science from the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). Dr Souza is the author of Constitutional Engineering in Brazil: The Politics of Federalism and Decentralization, published by Macmillan (London) and St Martin´s Press (NY). She has also written a number of journal articles and contributed to anthologies both in English and Portuguese.