Joel M. Caplan
Director Ph.D. (2008) Univ. of Pennsylvania |
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Joel M. Caplan has a PhD in Social Welfare Policy from the University of Pennsylvania and a MA in Criminal Justice from Rutgers University. He is a Professor in the School of Criminal Justice (SCJ). Dr. Caplan co-developed the spatial analysis technique known as Risk Terrain Modeling (RTM). RTM and the RTMDx software are now used by academic researchers and public safety practitioners in over 30 U.S. states and in dozens of countries worldwide. The White House, United Nations, National Academy of Sciences, World Bank, TED talks, and National Geographic Channel have featured Dr. Caplan’s research. Forbes ranked RTM among the ‘Top 5’ big-data analytic resources that can be used for ‘social good’.
Dr. Caplan has garnered an international reputation of prominence in the field of criminal justice. He has published two books with the University of California Press, authored over 50 articles in peer-reviewed journals, written more than 10 scholarly monographs or book chapters, delivered dozens of keynote addresses or invited presentations, chaired six doctoral dissertations, and serves on the editorial board of three refereed journals. He has raised millions of dollars in research funding. He is heavily engaged with the greater Newark Community, as well as other local governments and state agencies across the United States. In Newark he is the founder and Co-Executive Director of the Newark Public Safety Collaborative, which maximizes local resources, data and expertise to solve problems and improve public safety in the city in transparent, measurable and sustainable ways.
Dr. Caplan shows commitment to the diversity of people and perspectives, and realizes ways in which multiple points of view can add value to achieving shared goals. One theme in his work has been interdisciplinary collaboration, having partnered with psychologists, mathematicians, engineers, computer scientists, biologists, anthropologists, epidemiologist, and neurosurgeons at Rutgers University and elsewhere to integrate interdisciplinary concepts, theories, methods and data to study pressing problems in need of innovative solutions. As a computational criminologist, and from his grounded perspective as former police officer, 911 dispatcher, and emergency medical technician, he takes the strengths of several disciplines and continues to build new methods and techniques for the analysis of crime and crime patterns.
Dr. Caplan has garnered an international reputation of prominence in the field of criminal justice. He has published two books with the University of California Press, authored over 50 articles in peer-reviewed journals, written more than 10 scholarly monographs or book chapters, delivered dozens of keynote addresses or invited presentations, chaired six doctoral dissertations, and serves on the editorial board of three refereed journals. He has raised millions of dollars in research funding. He is heavily engaged with the greater Newark Community, as well as other local governments and state agencies across the United States. In Newark he is the founder and Co-Executive Director of the Newark Public Safety Collaborative, which maximizes local resources, data and expertise to solve problems and improve public safety in the city in transparent, measurable and sustainable ways.
Dr. Caplan shows commitment to the diversity of people and perspectives, and realizes ways in which multiple points of view can add value to achieving shared goals. One theme in his work has been interdisciplinary collaboration, having partnered with psychologists, mathematicians, engineers, computer scientists, biologists, anthropologists, epidemiologist, and neurosurgeons at Rutgers University and elsewhere to integrate interdisciplinary concepts, theories, methods and data to study pressing problems in need of innovative solutions. As a computational criminologist, and from his grounded perspective as former police officer, 911 dispatcher, and emergency medical technician, he takes the strengths of several disciplines and continues to build new methods and techniques for the analysis of crime and crime patterns.
Senior Fellow
Leslie Kennedy
Dr. Kennedy is the founder and former Executive Director of RCPS and University Professor and Dean Emeritus.
Leslie Kennedy
Dr. Kennedy is the founder and former Executive Director of RCPS and University Professor and Dean Emeritus.
Faculty Fellows
Eric L. Piza | [email protected]
Ph.D. (2012) Rutgers University
Dr. Piza’s research agenda focuses on the spatial analysis of crime patterns, evidence-based policing, crime control technology, and the integration of academic research and police practice. In support of his research, Dr. Piza has received over $3.7 million in outside research grants, including awards from the National Institute of Justice, Bureau of Justice Assistance, U.S. Department of State, Swedish National Council on Crime Prevention, and the Charles Koch Foundation’s Policing & Criminal Justice reform program. Dr. Piza has been a featured speaker at conferences and seminars organized by government agencies around the world, including the U.S. Department of Justice, London Mayor’s Office for Policing and Crime, Swedish National Council for Crime Prevention, Carabineros De Chile (The National Police Force of Chile), and New York State Division of Criminal Justice Services. Dr. Piza has published over 60 peer-reviewed journal articles and 3 books. Before entering academia, Piza served as the GIS Specialist of the Newark, NJ Police Department, responsible for the day-to-day crime analysis and program evaluation activities of the agency. He received his PhD from Rutgers University.
Nusret M. Sahin | [email protected]
Ph.D. Rutgers University
Dr. Sahin is an Associate Professor of Criminal Justice at Stockton University, NJ. He earned his Ph.D. from the Rutgers University School of Criminal Justice and his master’s degree from John Jay College of Criminal Justice. With over 13 years of experience as a practitioner and more than 10 years as a researcher, he has an extensive background in the field. He has skillfully conducted both quantitative and qualitative research to evaluate policing practices, and published in top-tier academic journals, including Justice Quarterly, Journal of Experimental Criminology, and Journal of Quantitative Criminology. He is currently leading the NIJ-funded EPJETS project, which involves providing drivers with procedural justice treatment and access to body-worn camera footage from their encounters with the police.
Eric L. Piza | [email protected]
Ph.D. (2012) Rutgers University
Dr. Piza’s research agenda focuses on the spatial analysis of crime patterns, evidence-based policing, crime control technology, and the integration of academic research and police practice. In support of his research, Dr. Piza has received over $3.7 million in outside research grants, including awards from the National Institute of Justice, Bureau of Justice Assistance, U.S. Department of State, Swedish National Council on Crime Prevention, and the Charles Koch Foundation’s Policing & Criminal Justice reform program. Dr. Piza has been a featured speaker at conferences and seminars organized by government agencies around the world, including the U.S. Department of Justice, London Mayor’s Office for Policing and Crime, Swedish National Council for Crime Prevention, Carabineros De Chile (The National Police Force of Chile), and New York State Division of Criminal Justice Services. Dr. Piza has published over 60 peer-reviewed journal articles and 3 books. Before entering academia, Piza served as the GIS Specialist of the Newark, NJ Police Department, responsible for the day-to-day crime analysis and program evaluation activities of the agency. He received his PhD from Rutgers University.
Nusret M. Sahin | [email protected]
Ph.D. Rutgers University
Dr. Sahin is an Associate Professor of Criminal Justice at Stockton University, NJ. He earned his Ph.D. from the Rutgers University School of Criminal Justice and his master’s degree from John Jay College of Criminal Justice. With over 13 years of experience as a practitioner and more than 10 years as a researcher, he has an extensive background in the field. He has skillfully conducted both quantitative and qualitative research to evaluate policing practices, and published in top-tier academic journals, including Justice Quarterly, Journal of Experimental Criminology, and Journal of Quantitative Criminology. He is currently leading the NIJ-funded EPJETS project, which involves providing drivers with procedural justice treatment and access to body-worn camera footage from their encounters with the police.
Research Associates
Marco Dugato | [email protected]
Senior Researcher at Transcrime since 2009 and Adjunct Professor of Methods and Techniques for Criminological Research at the Faculty of Political and Social Sciences of the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore in Milan, Italy. From the a.y. 2010/11 to the a.y. 2012/13 he has been Adjunct Professor of Crime Statistics at the Faculty of Sociology of the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore. He holds a PhD in Criminology at the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore and a MA in Sociology at the Università degli Studi di Milano Bicocca. He is a founding partner and administrator of Crime&tech, a spin-off company of Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore-Transcrime. His main research fields are spatial analysis of crime; predictive policing and risk assessment analysis; crime and criminal justice statistics; organized crime and illicit markets. He has coordinated several national and international research projects. His research has appeared in several peer-reviewed journals.
Kwan-Lamar Blount-Hill | [email protected]
PhD (2020) City University of New York Graduate Center / John Jay College of Criminal Justice
JD (2011) Emory University School of Law
Kwan Blount-Hill is an Assistant Professor of Criminology and Criminal Justice at Arizona State University and Assistant Director of its Center for Public Criminology. His research is focused on narrative and social identity within systems and processes of justice, including how marginalized communities and governments interact in the realm of public safety. Dr. Blount-Hill formerly served as a firefighter and police officer in South Carolina, a research manager at New York City's Mayor's Office of Criminal Justice, and the first Director of Research and Data Analytics for the Brooklyn prosecutor's office, inter alia, and has been licensed to practice law in three states. His work has appeared in peer reviewed journals, such as Criminal Justice and Behavior, Journal of Criminal Justice, Race and Justice, Public Administration Review, and Biological Conservation, and has been funded or awarded by several organizations including the American Sociological Association and the Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences.
Jared R. Dmello | [email protected]
Ph.D. (2019) University of Massachusetts Lowell
Dr. Jared R. Dmello is a Senior Lecturer of Criminology at the University of Adelaide. Jared has led multiple funded research teams on a variety of topics, including illicit networks, firearm violence, and pedagogical innovation. He is a globally recognized expert on illicit networks, with specializations in gangs, terrorist organizations, and cartels. His research applies innovative methodologies to explore new dynamics of conflicts. Some early work of his involved serving as the Principal Investigator on a grant funded by the National Institute of Justice using network science methods to investigate the longitudinal evolution of gang violence in the State of New Jersey. Jared has published research findings in many of the leading peer-reviewed outlets in the field, holds multiple competitive grants, and has been featured by media outlets across the globe as a quoted expert, including the LA Times, Rolling Stone Magazine, and National Geographic.
Alejandro Gimenez-Santana | [email protected]
Ph.D. (2018) Rutgers University
Dr. Alejandro Gimenez-Santana has a Ph.D. in Global Affairs from Rutgers University. He is an Assistant Professor of Professional Practice in the School of Criminal Justice at Rutgers University, where he serves as Co-Executive Director of the Newark Public Safety Collaborative (NPSC). Before assuming the position of NPSC Co-Executive Director, he served as a consultant for the World Bank regional office in Bogotá, Colombia, and the Inter-American Development Bank in Montevideo, Uruguay. His research focus includes spatial analytics, social disorganization, communities, and neighborhood effects on crime. He has extensively researched the association between unique contexts of social disorganization and the effect of the immediate built environment on the spatial distribution of violence and crime across various urban settings. He has over ten years of experience in the criminal justice field and has been invited to present at research and practitioner conferences in over a dozen countries across Europe, Latin America, and North America.
Paul Boxer | [email protected]
Ph.D. (2002) Bowling Green State University
Dr. Boxer is a Professor in the Department of Psychology at Rutgers-Newark, and Adjunct Research Scientist in the Research Center for Group Dynamics at the University of Michigan. His work focuses on the development of antisocial behavior, and the impact of exposure to violence and crime. Boxer has been PI or Co-PI on projects examining various aspects of violence and mental health funded by the US Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, the National Institute of Mental Health, the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, and the Centers for Disease Control. Boxer co-edited Treating the Juvenile Offender (2008, Guilford).
Erin Gibbs Van Brunschot | [email protected]
Erin Gibbs Van Brunschot is an Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Calgary. Her primary research interests are in the realms of crime, security and risk, with specific interests in how individual, organization and state orientations to related issues both diverge and converge. She authored Risk Balance and Security (2008; Sage) and Risk in Crime (2009; Rowman and Littlefield) with Les Kennedy.
Jason Matejkowski | [email protected]
Dr. Matejkowski is a Professor at the University of Kansas, School of Social Welfare. His research interests focus on mental health services for individuals with serious mental illnesses who are justice-involved and/or are homeless. Jason has researched housing services for individuals with long-term histories of chronic homelessness and mental illnesses, developed an online training for justice professionals to raise awareness of medication-assisted treatment for opioid addiction and has examined the relationships among mental illness, criminal risk factors, and parole release decisions in the State of New Jersey. His recent research has appeared in peer-reviewed journals including Law and Human Behavior, Journal of Forensic Psychiatry and Psychology, and Psychiatric Quarterly.
Simon Garnier | [email protected]
Ph.D. (2008) University of Toulouse
Simon Garnier is a Professor in the Federated Department of Biology at the New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT). He obtained a PhD from the University of Toulouse (France) under the direction of Dr. Guy Theraulaz and performed his postdoctoral work with Professor Iain Couzin at Princeton University. Simon is now the head of the Swarm Lab, an interdisciplinary research lab that studies the mechanisms underlying Collective Behaviors and Swarm Intelligence in natural and artificial systems. The Swarm Lab started to operate in July 2012 and its research aims to reveal the detailed functioning of collective intelligence in systems as diverse as ant colonies, human crowds or robotic swarms. The Swarm Lab focuses in particular on the mechanisms of information transfer and integration in large groups that can lead to adaptive (or “intelligent”) collective responses to environmental challenges.
Marco Dugato | [email protected]
Senior Researcher at Transcrime since 2009 and Adjunct Professor of Methods and Techniques for Criminological Research at the Faculty of Political and Social Sciences of the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore in Milan, Italy. From the a.y. 2010/11 to the a.y. 2012/13 he has been Adjunct Professor of Crime Statistics at the Faculty of Sociology of the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore. He holds a PhD in Criminology at the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore and a MA in Sociology at the Università degli Studi di Milano Bicocca. He is a founding partner and administrator of Crime&tech, a spin-off company of Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore-Transcrime. His main research fields are spatial analysis of crime; predictive policing and risk assessment analysis; crime and criminal justice statistics; organized crime and illicit markets. He has coordinated several national and international research projects. His research has appeared in several peer-reviewed journals.
Kwan-Lamar Blount-Hill | [email protected]
PhD (2020) City University of New York Graduate Center / John Jay College of Criminal Justice
JD (2011) Emory University School of Law
Kwan Blount-Hill is an Assistant Professor of Criminology and Criminal Justice at Arizona State University and Assistant Director of its Center for Public Criminology. His research is focused on narrative and social identity within systems and processes of justice, including how marginalized communities and governments interact in the realm of public safety. Dr. Blount-Hill formerly served as a firefighter and police officer in South Carolina, a research manager at New York City's Mayor's Office of Criminal Justice, and the first Director of Research and Data Analytics for the Brooklyn prosecutor's office, inter alia, and has been licensed to practice law in three states. His work has appeared in peer reviewed journals, such as Criminal Justice and Behavior, Journal of Criminal Justice, Race and Justice, Public Administration Review, and Biological Conservation, and has been funded or awarded by several organizations including the American Sociological Association and the Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences.
Jared R. Dmello | [email protected]
Ph.D. (2019) University of Massachusetts Lowell
Dr. Jared R. Dmello is a Senior Lecturer of Criminology at the University of Adelaide. Jared has led multiple funded research teams on a variety of topics, including illicit networks, firearm violence, and pedagogical innovation. He is a globally recognized expert on illicit networks, with specializations in gangs, terrorist organizations, and cartels. His research applies innovative methodologies to explore new dynamics of conflicts. Some early work of his involved serving as the Principal Investigator on a grant funded by the National Institute of Justice using network science methods to investigate the longitudinal evolution of gang violence in the State of New Jersey. Jared has published research findings in many of the leading peer-reviewed outlets in the field, holds multiple competitive grants, and has been featured by media outlets across the globe as a quoted expert, including the LA Times, Rolling Stone Magazine, and National Geographic.
Alejandro Gimenez-Santana | [email protected]
Ph.D. (2018) Rutgers University
Dr. Alejandro Gimenez-Santana has a Ph.D. in Global Affairs from Rutgers University. He is an Assistant Professor of Professional Practice in the School of Criminal Justice at Rutgers University, where he serves as Co-Executive Director of the Newark Public Safety Collaborative (NPSC). Before assuming the position of NPSC Co-Executive Director, he served as a consultant for the World Bank regional office in Bogotá, Colombia, and the Inter-American Development Bank in Montevideo, Uruguay. His research focus includes spatial analytics, social disorganization, communities, and neighborhood effects on crime. He has extensively researched the association between unique contexts of social disorganization and the effect of the immediate built environment on the spatial distribution of violence and crime across various urban settings. He has over ten years of experience in the criminal justice field and has been invited to present at research and practitioner conferences in over a dozen countries across Europe, Latin America, and North America.
Paul Boxer | [email protected]
Ph.D. (2002) Bowling Green State University
Dr. Boxer is a Professor in the Department of Psychology at Rutgers-Newark, and Adjunct Research Scientist in the Research Center for Group Dynamics at the University of Michigan. His work focuses on the development of antisocial behavior, and the impact of exposure to violence and crime. Boxer has been PI or Co-PI on projects examining various aspects of violence and mental health funded by the US Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, the National Institute of Mental Health, the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, and the Centers for Disease Control. Boxer co-edited Treating the Juvenile Offender (2008, Guilford).
Erin Gibbs Van Brunschot | [email protected]
Erin Gibbs Van Brunschot is an Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Calgary. Her primary research interests are in the realms of crime, security and risk, with specific interests in how individual, organization and state orientations to related issues both diverge and converge. She authored Risk Balance and Security (2008; Sage) and Risk in Crime (2009; Rowman and Littlefield) with Les Kennedy.
Jason Matejkowski | [email protected]
Dr. Matejkowski is a Professor at the University of Kansas, School of Social Welfare. His research interests focus on mental health services for individuals with serious mental illnesses who are justice-involved and/or are homeless. Jason has researched housing services for individuals with long-term histories of chronic homelessness and mental illnesses, developed an online training for justice professionals to raise awareness of medication-assisted treatment for opioid addiction and has examined the relationships among mental illness, criminal risk factors, and parole release decisions in the State of New Jersey. His recent research has appeared in peer-reviewed journals including Law and Human Behavior, Journal of Forensic Psychiatry and Psychology, and Psychiatric Quarterly.
Simon Garnier | [email protected]
Ph.D. (2008) University of Toulouse
Simon Garnier is a Professor in the Federated Department of Biology at the New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT). He obtained a PhD from the University of Toulouse (France) under the direction of Dr. Guy Theraulaz and performed his postdoctoral work with Professor Iain Couzin at Princeton University. Simon is now the head of the Swarm Lab, an interdisciplinary research lab that studies the mechanisms underlying Collective Behaviors and Swarm Intelligence in natural and artificial systems. The Swarm Lab started to operate in July 2012 and its research aims to reveal the detailed functioning of collective intelligence in systems as diverse as ant colonies, human crowds or robotic swarms. The Swarm Lab focuses in particular on the mechanisms of information transfer and integration in large groups that can lead to adaptive (or “intelligent”) collective responses to environmental challenges.
Visiting Research Fellows
2013 | Fall
Oren Gur is a Doctoral Candidate in Criminology, Law, and Justice at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC). His dissertation focuses on the life experiences and narrative practices of people who use illicit substances and engage in risky drinking behavior while attending professional or graduate school (law, medicine, business; social and interdisciplinary sciences), a high-status hard-to-reach population that mostly avoids contact with police and the criminal justice system. Oren's interests include applying spatial technologies (e.g., RTM, GPS) and neuroimaging techniques (e.g., MRI) to criminology and policing, and the relationship between micro and macro influences on the application of law in police encounters with diverse subgroups.
2013 | Summer [Link]
Renee Zahnow is a Postgraduate Student at the University of Queensland. She completed her Bachelor of Arts (Honors- first class) with a Criminology/Psychology major in 2009. Renee is a Research Officer for the Institute for Social Science Research at The University of Queensland and the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence in Policing and Security. In this role she works with the Australian Community Capacity Study (ACCS), a longitudinal survey of social processes and policing in communities in Australia (http://www.uq.edu.au/accs/). Her research interests include spatial and temporal crime patterns and urban criminology, specifically the impact of community composition on community processes like informal social control, disorder and crime.
2013 | Fall
Oren Gur is a Doctoral Candidate in Criminology, Law, and Justice at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC). His dissertation focuses on the life experiences and narrative practices of people who use illicit substances and engage in risky drinking behavior while attending professional or graduate school (law, medicine, business; social and interdisciplinary sciences), a high-status hard-to-reach population that mostly avoids contact with police and the criminal justice system. Oren's interests include applying spatial technologies (e.g., RTM, GPS) and neuroimaging techniques (e.g., MRI) to criminology and policing, and the relationship between micro and macro influences on the application of law in police encounters with diverse subgroups.
2013 | Summer [Link]
Renee Zahnow is a Postgraduate Student at the University of Queensland. She completed her Bachelor of Arts (Honors- first class) with a Criminology/Psychology major in 2009. Renee is a Research Officer for the Institute for Social Science Research at The University of Queensland and the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence in Policing and Security. In this role she works with the Australian Community Capacity Study (ACCS), a longitudinal survey of social processes and policing in communities in Australia (http://www.uq.edu.au/accs/). Her research interests include spatial and temporal crime patterns and urban criminology, specifically the impact of community composition on community processes like informal social control, disorder and crime.