Northeastern Alum Dr. Lucas Almeida: PART TWO – The LEADERs Placement That Led to a Network Science Career
This is a continuation of a two-part series on PhD Alum Lucas Almeida. Please read Part 1 to learn more about the beginnings of Dr. Almeida’s PhD experience and how he got involved with LEADERs.
By the time Lucas Almeida finished his PhD in Network Science at Northeastern in 2024, he had spent the better part of a decade learning to move fluidly between different, and at times completely opposing, spheres of thought: the social and the computational, the individual case and the systemic pattern, the theoretical model and the deployed pipeline in reality. This skill set, assembled piece by piece across eight years of independent research, cross-disciplinary teaching, and a well-timed industry placement, now anchors his professional identity.
He is currently a Senior Threat Intelligence Scientist at Trust Lab, a startup whose mission is improving trust and safety on the internet. The work is both urgent and technically demanding. Almeida operates at the interface between the company’s engineering and analyst teams, bridging the gap between human intelligence, gathered from sources such as a screenshot, report, or flag, and a scalable technological response. What begins as a single identified case of harmful content becomes, through the coding pipelines he develops, a mechanism for surfacing hundreds or thousands of similar cases across platforms. The targets vary: terrorists, child predators, coordinated inauthentic behavior, but his approach is consistent: combine the analytical depth of human intelligence with the reach of computation, and build systems that get better as they scale.
This image shows social media profiles of three different narco groups, along with their estimated reach through the color chart. The cartel represented by red is the largest and was recently officially designated as a terrorist group by the US government.
Almeida also noted that this work was the same as his dissertation, “My thesis was how to do the work I do now, but in a more focused way – with narco-terrorist networks in Brazil.” In fact, the drug cartel he focused on for his thesis was officially classified as a terrorist organization by the US Government recently; Almeida had argued in support of this classification back in 2024 despite it being a controversial take at the time, so he finds it validating to now see the impact of his past work on his current life years later. In ways like this, the journey from academic research to professional practice became more of a natural extension than a leap.
What LEADERs Helped Build
When Almeida reflects on how his time at Northeastern prepared him for this kind of work, he describes the academic work and the LEADERs program as the two parts to a whole – his PhD cannot be one without the other. Network Science gave him what he calls a “way to understand social problems deeply and map those onto how you extract data, how you process it, how you take a bunch of individual points and turn them into a collective analysis.” It’s a capacity that requires understanding the sociology of why a network forms, the physics of how it behaves, and the computer science of how to analyze it at scale. These are skills that must be built slowly across years of work that constantly push the edges of what we know.
The LEADERs program and his placement provided the applied layer. Almeida learned how to code at a corporate level working at a Harvard Business School-incubated startup in 2019. More than just writing elegant algorithms, he built things that get tested, tuned, deployed, and used by real systems to process millions of cases, “I learned how to take a library of knowledge about statistics and turn it into risk models that are then deployed, and how to go back and tune them so that they work outside of the lab.” This loop from model to deployment to refinement is the core of his current work.
First, but Not the Last
There is one more aspect of Almeida’s story that deserves its own recognition: he was the first international student to complete the LEADERs program, and he was part of the first cohort as well. Given that international PhD students face a distinct set of challenges navigating U.S. academic and professional culture, including different conventions around self-promotion, building professional relationships, and when and how to ask for what you need, the kind of visibility and networking that the LEADERs program explicitly encourages – putting your work into the world before it’s finished and making yourself known outside your immediate program – can run counter to the academic cultures many international students come from.
Almeida navigated that gap and has since personally encouraged at least four or five colleagues from the Network Science program to participate in the LEADERs program. He especially highlights how LEADERs is built by and for the student, “It’s something that can be made yours from the start with the resources of the university and a lot of support and guidance.” For an international student still learning the landscape of what’s possible in American academia, this kind of ownership over a professional development opportunity is genuinely rare.
The Advice He Wishes He’d Had Then
If Almeida could change anything he did along his PhD journey, it would be to make his work visible sooner. The culture of a demanding PhD program tends to reward depth over breadth, precision over approximation, and completion over iteration. You hold things back until they’re right. You don’t publicize your research until you have something “worthy” of an audience. He’s learned to ignore that perfectionist voice in order to move forward, “An okay result that you communicate clearly and leverage into networking is far more valuable than four tables of super precise graphs.” The connections one makes and nurtures compound in ways that a polished paper left too long in revision never will. Almeida urges PhD students to remember that inside the program, you are always the least senior person in the room, but outside of it, you are operating at an extraordinarily high level, and the sooner you start acting like it, the more of that level you can actually reach.
For those nearing the end of their programs and looking toward entering the job market, his advice is pragmatic and honest: The conditions aren’t easy, don’t hold out for the perfect role, and a position that isn’t your ideal might be the one that opens a door you didn’t know existed, “You’re already in the top fraction of a percent in terms of skills, you just have to package it in a way that makes sense for employers.” As for the international students who are now where he once was – navigating a new country, academic culture, and professional conduct – his stresses that his own success story can be theirs too: He found his way through to build something that mattered.
Photo credits: Lucas Almeida, United Nations Interregional Crime and Justice Research Institute
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].