Northeastern Alum Dr. Lucas Almeida: PART ONE – Building a Network Science Career Through LEADERs

An Independent Road 

             There’s a particular type of person who goes looking for complexity on purpose, and Dr. Lucas Almeida is one of them. Before he ever set foot on Northeastern’s campus, he had spent four years immersed in the federal politics of Brazil: advising a congressman, leading a team of policy analysts, drafting legislation, writing speeches, and watching up close how institutions make decisions about the world. When Almeida decided to pursue a PhD, he didn’t leave that world behind; He just went deeper into it.

             Almeida arrived at Northeastern in 2016 as part of the third cohort in the Network Science PhD program, a discipline that sits deliberately at the intersection of multiple fields: data science, sociology, computational science, and physics. His aim was to study how complex systems behave. His chosen focus was criminal and terrorist networks. Specifically, he used network analysis to understand the structure and behavior of narco-terrorist groups in Brazil. It was research that drew directly from his observations working in government, now examined through a rigorous computational lens. The program itself was still so new that there were no prior graduates when he enrolled, so Almeida recalled not being sure how things would progress. He came to find out, however, that uncertainty was part of the education, as was the program’s wide intellectual breadth. One week, students would be working through high-level political theory, and the next, deriving mathematical models for how epidemics spread through populations. Almeida gained skills to move fluidly between these spheres, and he learned to do meaningful work in both. 

             What made Almeida’s path especially distinctive was that, unlike many of his peers, he conducted fully independent research outside of the lab. His advisor provided guidance and feedback, but the data, questions, and direction were entirely his own. That independence provided him with real intellectual freedom, but it also required Almeida to fund his own work by teaching in three separate departments: criminology, urban environmental planning, and computer science. It was a demanding schedule that Almeida completed in 2024, having navigated COVID and other disruptions along the way. Despite these challenges, the breadth of experience he accumulated as an independent researcher and cross-disciplinary teacher was still the right type of training for his career.

             Almeida also had to navigate a cultural dimension throughout his PhD journey. Originally from Brazil, he completed both his undergraduate degree and his master’s there before beginning his doctorate at Northeastern. The academic cultures are meaningfully different: Brazilian higher education tends toward more structured, prescribed curricula, while U.S. doctoral programs place a premium on student-driven exploration and self-direction, “Learning how to move from a much more rigid curricular system to one that gives you more freedom, and where the department also expects more freedom from you, was part of the transition.” 

This ball chart illustrates the large volumes of data that Dr. Almeida worked with during his dissertation, maintaining statistical accuracy while growing from a small sample of about 600 from each cartel to 8,000, and eventually to 70,000, by using their network connections. This finding revealed that these cartels were operating at a much larger scale than originally estimated by the literature.

The LEADERs Experiment 

             It was in this context that Almeida encountered the LEADERs Certificate Program, becoming the first international student to participate in it. He was, by his own account, looking for something resembling a co-op experience for PhD students. Northeastern’s co-op program is one of the university’s most recognized features, and Almeida had come to the school in part because of its reputation for applied learning, “When you search Northeastern, you always find the co-ops, and I thought, is there a co-op for PhD?” When Almeida received an email about LEADERs in his inbox, he signed up for an information session and was hooked from there*. In fact, he was in the program’s very first cohort, which added another layer of novelty. The course itself turned out to be valuable in ways Almeida didn’t fully anticipate. It gave structure to the things he was already doing intuitively: methods for managing research, coursework, teaching, conference work, and rest all at once. The leadership component deepened his understanding of concepts like leading from the middle and helped him think through what it means to show up as a PhD voice within a collaborative or industry setting. 

             For his LEADERs placement, Almeida was matched with a risk analysis startup based in the Harvard Business School incubator. His project was to develop a customized risk assessment algorithm using epidemic models as the underlying logic, deployable across multiple data sources. This was in 2019, one year before the COVID pandemic. That he built epidemic-based risk models one year before COVID made it the subject of global obsession, is not lost on Almeida. Epidemic spread had been a core part of the Network Science curriculum for years, and suddenly, the rest of the world was trying to catch up to vocabulary he and his program had long understood. 

             Working directly with the CEO, rather than within a lab or university structure, meant Almeida worked with a completely different set of priorities. Code optimization, the kind of meticulous refinement prized in academic research, mattered less than resourcefulness – finding the compute power to let something run, rather than spending weeks making it run perfectly. The lesson he learned in real time was to know your scope, deliver on what was proposed, and resist the pull to solve every problem in the room. He left the placement having internalized something that would carry him far past graduation – the difference between knowing how to do research and knowing how to make research work.  

* While co-ops are offered to PhD and master students as well, the LEADERs Program offers a different experience that is still similar to the traditional co-op. LEADERs was created specifically with doctoral researchers in mind, with a focus centered around using experiential education to bridge the gap between technical skills and the real word for PhD students and Post Doctoral researchers. 

Thank you for reading Part 1 of Dr. Almeida’s PhD journey. We will follow up with Part 2 soon to share more about the work he is doing today and how the LEADERs program supported his path there. 

Photo credits: Lucas Almeida 

Upon completion of the “Leading Self and Others” course, LEADERs program staff and partner companies select fellows who align with specific industry needs. PhDs are supported through the fellowship application process and placed in a specialized role to solve a problem in industry. The program is run by the PhD Network, which helps prepare students to enter the workforce as impactful researchers.  

If you are interested in hosting a LEADERs student at your organization, or are curious about learning more, please contact Wendy Eaton, director of LEADERs partnership relations, [email protected]