Karina P. Lago was born in Uruguay, and educated in her native country and in the United States. She graduated from Brown magna cum laude and with honors in Portuguese and Brazilian Studies in 1995. At graduation she was elected to Phi Beta Kappa, and was awarded the Portuguese and Brazilian Studies Honors Prize and the Emery Fellowship for Graduate Studies. Her honors thesis, entitled "To Punish or Not to Punish: Domestic Violence and the Criminal Justice in Brazil," received the Helen Terry Mac Leod Prize as the outstanding thesis focusing on women and gender.
Karina participated in the Brown-in-Brazil Program at the Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro in the fall of 1993, and returned to Brazil in the summer of 1994 to work as an intern in the Political and Economic Office of the United States Consulate General in Rio de Janeiro. Karina was admired by her teachers for her intelligence, creativity and uncompromising honesty, and was highly respected by her peers in the Portuguese and Brazilian Studies Program as well as in the Brown University Hispanic Community, for whom she was a role model. At the time of her untimely death on November 6, 1995, Karina was a graduate student at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy in Medford, Massachusetts.