Understanding violence, order, and community from the ground up

I am a Assistant Professor in the School of Criminal Justice at the University at Albany, SUNY, where I also earned my B.A. I received my Ph.D. in Criminal Justice from Rutgers University.

Before joining Albany's faculty, I spent five years as a Senior Data Scientist at the University of Pennsylvania's Crime and Justice Policy Lab, where I served as Qualitative Research Director on violence reduction evaluations funded by the National Institutes of Health, Arnold Ventures, the Bureau of Justice Assistance, the Annie E. Casey Foundation, and other federal and philanthropic sponsors. That work took me inside police departments, community organizations, and the daily lives of people most impacted by violence and the criminal legal system. It convinced me that the most consequential dynamics in crime and safety are often invisible to conventional methods, and it shaped a research program built on proximity.

My scholarship is organized around a central question: how do marginalized communities experience and respond to violence, and what roles do formal and informal institutions play in producing or undermining safety? I pursue this through ethnographic fieldwork, in-depth interviewing, and community-engaged methods, often alongside quasi-experimental and administrative data approaches. This range lets me capture ground-level realities that quantitative work alone cannot reach while staying in conversation with the broader empirical literature. My research falls across four domains.