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.

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.  Professor Ko-lin 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).

Marcus Felson, Ph.D., University of Michigan.  Professor Felson originated the routine activity approach to crime rate analysis. He is an expert in how to think about crime in very tangible terms and how to reduce it using such thinking. His books include Crime and Nature (Sage, 2006) as well as Crime and Everyday Life (Sage, 2002), now in its third edition. He has also written about the role of business in crime and crime reduction. His work is increasingly applied to understand juvenile street gangs, co-offending, organized crime, and outdoor drug sales.

James O. Finckenauer, Ph.D., New York University.  Dr. Finckenauer's research and teaching interests include international and comparative criminal justice, transnational crime, organized crime, crime policy, and evaluation research. He is the author or editor of nine books, as well as hundreds of articles, chapters, and reports. His most recent book is Mafia and Organized Crime: A Beginner's Guide (Oneworld Publications, 2007). Professor Finckenauer has lectured around the world and been a visiting scholar in Australia, Germany, Japan, and Russia.

Adam Graycar, Ph.D., University of New South Wales.  Professor Graycar has long worked at the interface of knowledge development, knowledge transmission, and public policy. Before coming to Rutgers as dean in 2007, he held senior positions in policy development in the Government of South Australia. For nine years, he was the director of the Australian Institute of Criminology, a federal government agency whose task is to provide quality information and conduct policy-oriented research, so as to inform government decisions on crime and justice, locally, nationally, and internationally. His latest book (with Peter Grabosky) is the Cambridge Handbook of Australian Criminology (Cambridge University Press, 2002).

George L. Kelling, Ph.D., University of Wisconsin.  Professor Kelling is faculty chair of the Police Institute at Rutgers University. In 1972, Kelling began work at the Police Foundation in Washington, D.C.,  and conducted several large-scale experiments, most notably the Kansas City Preventive Patrol Experiment and the Newark Foot Patrol Experiment. The latter was the source of his contribution to his most familiar publication in Atlantic Monthly, "Broken Windows," with James Q. Wilson. During the late 1980s, Kelling developed the order maintenance policies in the New York City subway that ultimately led to radical crime reductions. His most recent major publication with Catherine M. Coles is Fixing Broken Windows: Restoring Order and Reducing Crime in Our Communities (Free Press, 1998).

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.

Damian J. Martinez, Ph.D., University of Chicago.  Dr. Martinez is an assistant professor in the School of Criminal Justice with a joint appointment in the Department of Social Work at Rutgers-Newark. His current research and scholarship focus broadly on former prisoner reentry, offender rehabilitation, and Hispanics/Latinos in the criminal justice system. He has published on these topics in the Journal of Ethnicity in Criminal Justice, Columbia Human Rights Law Review, Journal of Offender Rehabilitation, and Journal of Contemporary Ethnography.

Michael G. Maxfield, Ph.D., Northwestern University.  Michael G. Maxfield has written extensively on topics such as victimization, policing, homicide, community corrections, and long-term consequences of child abuse and neglect. His research articles have appeared in what are widely regarded as the top three journals in criminology. He is the coauthor (with Earl Babbie) of the textbook, Research Methods for Criminal Justice and Criminology (Wadsworth Publishing, 2007), now in its fifth edition, and coeditor (with Mike Hough) of Surveying Crime in the 21st Century (Criminal Justice Press, 2007), in the Crime Prevention Studies series. Recent projects collaborate with police departments and other justice agencies in the areas of repeat domestic violence, performance measurement systems, and auto theft.

Mercer L. Sullivan, Ph.D., Columbia University.  Professor Sullivan's book Getting Paid: Youth Crime and Work in the Inner City (Cornell University Press, 1989) is widely cited as a seminal study of ecological influences on youth development. He is one of the first researchers to have studied the male role in teenage pregnancy and parenting. His other research has examined the roles of community development corporations in promoting public safety, multiple-victim school shootings, patterns of ordinary school violence, the relation of public perceptions of youth gang activity to actual patterns of youth violence, and the social processes of reentry from juvenile incarceration. He teaches courses on qualitative research methods, violent crime, juvenile justice, developmental and life course criminology, and general criminology.

Bonita Veysey, Ph.D., University at Albany.  Dr. Veysey's research has focused on behavioral health and justice issues, including mental health and substance abuse treatment in jails and prisons; diversion and treatment services for youth and adults with behavioral health problems; and conditions of confinement and the effects of trauma. She has extensive experience in program evaluation and frequently consults with local communities. She is now working with Dr. Christian and Dr. Martinez on an edited volume entitled Identity Transformation and Offender Change that is expected to be published in early 2009.

Norman Samuels, Ph.D., Duke University.  Dr. Samuels recently returned to the faculty after serving for three decades in senior university administrative roles. His research interests are in the fields of terrorism and counterterrorism, security and intelligence studies, the intersection of international terrorism and crime, and in particular, the interface among these topics and the American system of government. He teaches courses and advises graduate students in these areas. He is a university professor and provost emeritus.