Robert Apel,
Ph.D., University of Maryland, College Park. Dr. Apel's research interests include employment and labor markets; violent victimization and injury; incarceration and status attainment; family dynamics and antisocial behavior; applied econometrics. Particular areas of his research expertise concerns the relationship between youth employment and criminal behavior as well as the short- and long-term impacts of incarceration during the transition to adulthood.
Edem F. Avakame,
Ph.D., University of Alberta. Dr. Avakame earned a B.A. degree in economics and sociology from the University of Cape Coast, Ghana. He earned his M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in sociology from the University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada. He has served as a professor of criminal justice at Temple University, Philadelphia, and was the first Andrew W. Mellon Research Fellow on Race and Crime at the Vera Institute of Justice, New York, NY. His research interests include the nature and causes of violence in the home; the relationship between race, social class, and crime; and the longitudinal influences of social structural disadvantage on child adolescent development.
Valerio Bacak, Ph.D., University of Pennsylvania. Dr. Bacak joined the faculty in the School of Criminal Justice at Rutgers University in 2015. His main research interest is in understanding how offending and contact with the criminal justice system are related to health. His other lines of research include youth sexuality, health disparities, and social epidemiology of HIV/AIDS among sex workers, injection drug users, and men who have sex with men. Originally from Croatia, Dr. Bacak has extensive international experience conducting research in resource-limited settings. Since 2005, he has consulted on public health projects for various United Nations organizations in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, Azerbaijan, West Bank and Gaza, and Iraq. His studies have appeared in journals across disciplines, such as Social Problems, Social Science and Medicine, and Archives of Sexual Behavior.
Rodney K. Brunson, Ph.D., University of Illinois at Chicago. Dr. Brunson joined the faculty in 2010 as associate professor. His broad research interests focus on class, gender, race, and criminal justice; communities and crime; criminological theory; juvenile delinquency; gangs and female gang involvement. His work appears in the British Journal of Criminology, Criminology, Criminology & Public Policy, Gender & Society, Justice Quarterly, Sociological Quarterly, Urban Affairs Review, and the Journal of Crime and Justice. Dr. Brunson was recently awarded the Tory J. Caeti Outstanding Young Scholar Award by the Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences, Juvenile Justice Section.
Joel Caplan,
Ph.D., University of Pennsylvania. In 2008, Dr. Caplan joined the faculty as assistant professor. His dissertation was on victim input into parole decisions. He has been a research associate at the University of Pennsylvania's Cartographic Modeling Lab (CML), where he has applied spatial analysis to projects relating to gun violence, emergency medical services, disaster management, mental illness, prisoner reentry, and crime control. His research focuses on social controls, particularly public safety and corrections. He studies the intersection of criminal justice policies and practices and the effects on various stakeholders such as victims, offenders, practitioners, and the public-at-large.
Ko-lin Chin,
Ph.D.
,
University of Pennsylvania. Dr. Chin has received funding from the National Science Foundation as well as two Fulbright Scholarships for his work on organized crime and transnational criminal activity. His most recent book is Golden Triangle: From Opium and Heroin to Methamphetamine (Cornell University Press, 2008). Currently he is conducting a study on sex trafficking in Asia and the United States.
Johnna
Christian,
Ph.D.,
University at Albany. Dr. Christian's broad research interests are corrections, race and gender, and urban studies. Her work examines incarceration's impact on families and neighborhoods. Her study of prisoners' families will help better understand the justice system's impact on diverse racial and ethnic groups, and more specifically, communities that experience high rates of incarceration.
Ronald V. Clarke,
Ph.D., University of London. Dr. Clarke led the team that originated situational crime prevention and is now considered to be the world's leading authority on that approach. He also jointly developed the rational choice perspective on crime with Derek Cornish. Dr. Clarke is the founding editor of Crime Prevention Studies and is author or joint author of well over 200 books, monographs, and papers, including Become a Problem Solving Crime Analyst (U.S. Dept of Justice, 2005) and Outsmarting the Terrorists (Praeger, 2006).
Todd Clear, Ph.D., University at Albany.
Dr. Clear is a former provost at Rutgers University–Newark and former dean of the School of Criminal Justice. Dr. Clear received his Ph.D. in criminal justice from the University at Albany, and has also held professorships at Ball State University, Florida State University (where he was also associate dean of the School of Criminology and Criminal Justice) and John Jay College of Criminal Justice (where he held the rank of distinguished professor). Dr. Clear has authored 13 books and over 100 articles and book chapters. His most recent book is The Punishment Imperative, (NYU Press). Dr. Clear has also written on community justice, correctional classification, prediction methods in correctional programming, community-based correctional methods, intermediate sanctions, and sentencing policy, and is currently involved in studies of the criminological implications of "place," and the economics of justice reinvestment. Dr. Clear has served as president of the American Society of Criminology, the Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences, and the Association of Doctoral Programs in Criminology and Criminal Justice. His work has been recognized through several awards, including those of the American Society of Criminology, the Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences, the Rockefeller School of Public Policy, the American Probation and Parole Association, the American Correctional Association, and the International Community Corrections Association. Dr. Clear is also the founding editor of the journal Criminology & Public Policy, published by the American Society of Criminology.
Elizabeth Griffiths,
Ph.D., University of Toronto. Dr. Griffiths's research focuses on explaining spatial and temporal trends in homicide across neighborhoods, the role of family structure in producing victimization risk, and public housing in the urban context. Dr. Griffiths is presently a co-investigator on a multiyear evaluation of a HOPE VI public housing redevelopment project in Atlanta. Her research has appeared in such journals as Criminology and The Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency.
Leslie W. Kennedy,
Ph.D., University of Toronto. Dr. Kennedy has published extensively in the areas of fear of crime, victimology, and violence. His current research in public security builds upon his previous work in event analysis and understanding the social contexts in which dangers in society are identified and deterred. He is the coauthor, with Van Brunschot, of Risk Balance and Security (Sage, 2008), a book that examines how risk is assessed by agencies faced with major hazards including crime, terrorism, environmental disaster, and disease. He is the coauthor with Vince Sacco of The Criminal Event (Wadsworth Publishing, 2001), appearing in its fourth edition.
Sarah E. Lageson, Ph.D., University of Minnesota. Dr. Lageson studies how technology changes law, criminal justice, media on crime, and systems of American punishment. She received her Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Minnesota in 2015. Her current research examines the growth of online crime data that remains publicly available, and creating new forms of "digital punishment." Her work has appeared in Criminology, Law and Social Inquiry, the British Journal of Sociology, Contexts, and numerous edited volumes. Sarah is interested in a mixed methods approach and producing scholarship accessible to policy and broader public debate.
Jody A. Miller, Ph.D., University of Southern California. Dr. Jody Miller received her Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Southern California in 1996. She joined the faculty in 2010 as professor. Dr. Miller specializes in feminist theory and qualitative research methods. Her research focuses on gender, crime and victimization in the context of urban communities, the commercial sex industry, and youth gangs. She is the author of Getting Played: African American Girls, Urban Inequality, and Gendered Violence (New York University Press, 2008)--a finalist for the 2008 C. Wright Mills Award--and One of the Guys: Girls Gangs and Gender (Oxford University Press, 2001), as well as numerous articles and book chapters. Dr. Miller was also recently awarded the Distinguished Contribution to Scholarship Book Award by the American Sociological Association.
Joel Miller, Ph.D., University of Surrey. Dr. Joel Miller has spent much of his career carrying out research in applied criminal justice settings, including six years working in the British Home Office and five years at the Vera Institute of Justice. He has led studies on a range of criminal justice topics, including police accountability, racial profiling, police corruption, juvenile delinquency, recidivism, alternatives to incarceration, and crime reduction and prevention.
Michael Ostermann, Ph.D., Rutgers University. Dr. Ostermann is an assistant professor and the director of the Rutgers University Evidence-Based Institute. His research interests primarily lie within the fields of corrections and reentry and how they intersect with public policy. Dr. Ostermann serves as a consulting editor for the Journal of Research and Adolescence and has served on the Board of Directors for the New Jersey Chapter of the American Correctional Association. His research has been awarded by the American Probation and Parole Association. Prior to coming to Rutgers, Dr. Ostermann directed the New Jersey State Parole Board's research and policy analysis initiatives.
Andres F. Rengifo, Ph.D., CUNY, Graduate Center-John Jay College. Dr. Rengifo's research focuses primarily on the macrolevel intersection between sentencing policies and imprisonment. He also studies social networks and urban crime and disorder. Dr. Rengifo's current areas of interest include the study of corrections policy and innovation at the state and local levels, the evolution of co-offending networks over time and space, and comparative work on issues of public safety and crime control in Latin America (Colombia, Venezuela, Dominican Republic, Chile, Jamaica).
