Dr. Andrea

Dr. Andrea is an economist and public policy scholar with more than twelve years of cross-sector experience in research, teaching, and international development. Her career bridges academic research, applied policy design, and institutional collaboration, with a clear mission: to advance equity, access, and effective governance across the United States and Latin America.

Currently based at the School of Public and International Affairs at Virginia Tech, Dr. Briceño teaches graduate-level courses in Research Methods I and II, Quantitative Methods, and Policy Design, where she equips emerging policymakers and analysts with the skills needed to design and evaluate policies that improve lives. Her teaching blends methodological rigor with real-world application, encouraging students to see data not merely as numbers but as stories about people, systems, and opportunities.

In her courses, Dr. Andrea emphasizes critical thinking, ethical inquiry, and methodological precision. She guides students through the process of crafting research questions, selecting appropriate analytical tools, and interpreting evidence in ways that inform meaningful policy decisions. Her teaching has consistently been praised for its clarity, relevance, and capacity to make complex analytical tools—such as regression models, causal inference, and survey design—accessible to students from diverse professional and disciplinary backgrounds.

Before joining Virginia Tech, Dr. Andrea taught economics courses in her native Colombia, where she contributed to the development of future economists and public sector leaders. Her experience in Latin America has deeply shaped her understanding of development challenges and governance systems in diverse institutional contexts. Fluent in Spanish and English, she brings a cross-cultural perspective that allows her to connect technical analysis with the lived realities of communities and stakeholders across Latin America and the United States.

In addition to her academic roles, Dr. Andrea has collaborated with international and regional organizations, including the Organization of American States (OAS) and the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB). In these engagements, she has designed and evaluated programs focused on institutional reform, social inclusion, and administrative efficiency. Her cross-sector experience—spanning academia, government, and multilateral institutions—has provided her with a holistic view of how evidence can drive better policy and how governance structures can either facilitate or hinder equitable outcomes.

Her research agenda centers on the concept of administrative burdens—the time, effort, and psychological costs that citizens face when trying to access public programs and services. She investigates how bureaucratic complexity, discretionary implementation, and intergovernmental tensions shape the experiences of marginalized groups. Her research seeks to answer questions such as: How do administrative procedures reproduce inequality? Why do citizens in disadvantaged positions often bear higher opportunity costs in their interactions with the state? And how can public institutions reduce these burdens through policy and design innovation?

Dr. Andrea scholarship has appeared in leading peer-reviewed journals in public administration and policy studies. Her recent article, “Gauging the Inequality of Time Use in Government Services,” published in the Journal of Social Equity and Public Administration, exemplifies her interdisciplinary approach. The study analyzes 20 years of U.S. federal government data to uncover how structural inequities manifest through waiting times and access to services. She argues that time itself is an economic resource, one that imposes higher opportunity costs on individuals in disadvantaged positions. By revealing how administrative inefficiencies disproportionately affect low-income and marginalized citizens, the article exposes a hidden layer of inequality within routine bureaucratic encounters—one that has long-term implications for equity, trust in government, and policy legitimacy.

Beyond this publication, Dr. Andrea has conducted and supervised research on education policy, workforce development, immigration, and language access, using mixed-methods designs that integrate large-scale quantitative data with qualitative insights from interviews, focus groups, and document analysis. Her methodological expertise includes advanced quantitative analysis (using Stata, R, and Power BI) and qualitative inquiry (using Atlas.ti and NVivo). She is particularly adept at synthesizing statistical patterns with lived experiences, ensuring that policy recommendations are both empirically sound and contextually grounded.