Curriculum Vitae

Iara Passos

Data Engineer & Sociologist

Porto Alegre, Brazil - Codeberg - LinkedIn

B.S. in Statistics Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS), 2017 – 2026 (Expected)
- Thesis: Building a Spatial Index of Algorithmic Vulnerability in Porto Alegre using Principal Component Analysis (PCA).
MBA in Data Science & Analytics USP/ESALQ, 2023 – 2025
- Final Project: Analytical dashboard for monitoring citizen perception of digital public services.
M.S. in Sociology Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS), 2018 – 2020
- Thesis: Bias in risk assessment algorithms within the US criminal justice system.
Specialization in Criminology Institute of Criminology and Criminal Policy (ICPC), 2021
B.A. in Social Sciences Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS), 2013 – 2016

Triple Award Winner - ASA Data Quest (National Phase, 2025): Led the “Juntos e Misturados” team in a global investigation into gender equity and sustainable development (World Bank, WEF, OECD, and UNDP data). Awarded in:
- Best Statistical Insight: Quantified the impact of gender inequality on infant mortality (explaining 78% of data variation) and identified diverging paths for political vs. economic equity.
- Best Consideration of Ethics: For a methodological approach grounded in social responsibility and critical data analysis.
- Best Data Visualization: For excellence and clarity in communicating complex global metrics.
- Technical Stack: Random Forest (Predictive Modeling) and K-Means (Clustering).

Humanitarian Logistics Suite (RS Floods 2024 - Present): developed a libre, offline-first R/Shiny application for managing shelters and donation centers during the climate catastrophe in Southern Brazil. Migrated from proprietary tools to a sovereign, community-owned infrastructure. Repository
Agroecology & Tech Working Group (2026 – Present): co-founder of a working group dedicated to developing Libre technologies for Community Supported Agriculture (CSA). This initiative emerged from ongoing immersions in rural settlements to bridge the digital divide for organic farmers.

R-Ladies Porto Alegre (2017 – Present): Co-Founder & Organizer. Leading workshops and mentorship to promote gender diversity and technical emancipation in the R community.
AI Inclusive (2021 – Present): Organizer. Global initiative to increase representation of historically marginalized groups in Artificial Intelligence.
Olha o Rapa / UFABC (2025 – Present): Volunteer Researcher. Structuring data to protect street vendors from police violence and institutional abuse.
Coletivo Farpa (2023 – Present): Data Collaborator. Working on civic tech projects focused on public transparency and open data.
AIRES PUCRS (2024 – Present): Researcher. Member of the Responsible AI and Ethics research group.

Data Engineer

Developing scalable ETL pipelines using Databricks and PySpark in Azure Cloud environments.
Implementing Data Quality frameworks and optimizing processes for performance and sovereign infrastructure transitions.

Data Analyst & Tech Lead (B2B Project)

Acted as the sole data professional for a strategic B2B project, taking end-to-end ownership of data engineering, data science, and analytics.
Architected data pipelines to integrate and validate heterogeneous data from 10+ different ERP systems across 1,500 retail stores.
Implemented NLP (LLMs) to classify and standardize unstructured data at scale, ensuring consistency across large-scale systems.

Data Analyst

Applied NLP models (TensorFlow/GPT) for sentiment analysis in large-scale institutional surveys.
Automated reporting pipelines using Azure Data Lake and Power BI.

Quantitative Researcher

Project: “National Prison System Census” (UNDP/CNJ partnership).
Handled high-risk sensitive data regarding human rights violations.
Performed complex data cleaning and statistical reporting using R (Tidyverse) to provide evidence-based advocacy for prison reform.

Data Specialist

Developed R Shiny dashboards to visualize the capacity of municipal civil defense agencies across Brazil.
Conducted statistical and qualitative diagnoses of disaster management governance.

MARCHEZINI, V. et al. Diagnóstico de Capacidades e Necessidades Municipais em Proteção e Defesa Civil [Diagnosis of Municipal Capacities and Needs in Civil Defense and Protection]. Published by the Ministry of Regional Development (MDR), United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), and Cemaden, 2021.
- Note: Co-authored a 6-volume collection (1 National, 5 Regional) analyzing infrastructure, technology, and governance of civil defense agencies across Brazil to guide national public policy.

PASSOS, I. C. “Análise de Dados Qualitativos com o R” [Qualitative Data Analysis with R]. Revista Inter-Legere, v. 4, n. 30, 2021.
PASSOS, I. C. “Controle de riscos e seletividade penal: avaliação de risco no sistema de justiça criminal dos EUA” [Risk Control and Penal Selectivity: Risk Assessment in the US Criminal Justice System]. Revista Contraponto, v. 7, n. 2, 2020.
SCHABBACH, L. M.; PASSOS, I. C. “A produção da ordem no Presídio Central de Porto Alegre pela Polícia Militar” [The Production of Order in the Porto Alegre Central Prison by the Military Police]. Revista Direito GV, v. 16, n. 2, 2020.

Book Revision & Update: Collaborated on the technical revision of “Política Criminal Atuarial: a criminologia do fim da história” [Actuarial Criminal Policy: The Criminology of the End of History] by Prof. Maurício Dieter (USP), a seminal reference on the intersection of actuarial statistics and criminal policy.

Programming: R (Advanced), Python, SQL, JavaScript.
Data Engineering: PySpark, Databricks, Azure, offline-first architecture.
Data Science & AI: NLP (Spacy, Transformers, LLMs), Web Scraping, Statistical Modeling, PCA.
Environment & Tools: Linux (Power User), Git/Codeberg, Docker.
Languages: Portuguese (Native), English (Fluent), Spanish (Advanced).