Rafael Mesquita is Assistant Professor of International Relations at the Political Science Department of the Federal University of Pernambuco (UFPE, Brazil) and coordinator of the research program “Multilateralism and Global Challenges: Past, Present, and Future” funded by the Brazilian CNPq involving 7 universities in Brazil, France, and Germany. Rafael’s research has focused on the ground-up construction of original datasets in areas of international politics where open data are still lacking. This was first pursued with regards to the diplomatic networks of emerging countries and is now applied to the United Nations, with outputs of this agenda featured in Third World Quarterly, International Studies Review, and International Studies Quarterly. He will be a Visiting Scholar at the Saltzman Institute for War and Peace Studies in Columbia University from December 2023 to April 2024 under the supervision of prof. Michael Doyle. While at the Institute, Rafael will work on a book manuscript providing the first data-driven account of the evolution of the UN and of the core themes of international politics by applying network analysis and NLP methods to the corpus of all UN resolutions from 1946 to present day. Rafael has also provided consultancy to the UN in the context of the “Data Diplomacy Project“, which seeks to harness the potential of data science to level the playing field and equip governments more equitably to operate in multilateral organizations. He obtained his PhD in Political Science from UFPE in 2018/9, with visits to the University of Oxford and to the German Institute for Global and Area Studies (GIGA). He is blessed with a precious family on both sides of the hemisphere, in Brazil and in the US.