Dr Daniela Portella Sampaio

Dr Daniela Portella Sampaio is a Brazilian-British political scientist specialising in Latin American geopolitics, international security, maritime affairs and polar governance. She holds a PhD in International Relations from the University of São Paulo, which included a research period in Geopolitics at Royal Holloway, University of London. Her work examines the Southern Cone’s role in regional and global security, the strategic implications of maritime and polar regimes, and the international politics of the South Atlantic and Antarctica.

Daniela has more than fifteen years of international research and policy experience across Brazil, Argentina, the UK and Germany. She has held two Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellowships at the University of Leeds and the Alfred Wegener Institute; the latter also included a secondment at the European Polar Board in The Hague. Following an internship at the Antarctic Treaty Secretariat in Buenos Aires in 2015, she has continuously served as an Advisor to the Antarctic Treaty Consultative Meetings on institutional and legal matters. Her work for the Secretariat has also included research on liability and environmental remediation, undertaken in engagement with the International Oil Pollution Compensation Funds and published as a Secretariat Paper (2022).

Her wider policy engagement includes giving oral evidence to the UK Parliament (2024), contributing to strategic-foresight discussions with the UK Ministry of Defence (2025), reviewing an In-Depth Analysis for the European Parliament (2023), and presenting research to the Netherlands Ministry of Infrastructure and Water Management (2019). She is co-author of The Worldviews of Ice (Springer, 2026) and has a monograph on Antarctic governance under contract with Routledge.

Areas of Expertise

‘America’; ‘Latin America’; ‘Arctic and High North’; ‘Antarctic and the Southern Ocean’, ‘Global Security’ and ‘Diplomacy’.