National Academies Press: OpenBook

Strengthening the National Institute of Justice (2010)

Chapter: Appendix F: Biographical Sketches of Committee Members and Staff

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Suggested Citation:"Appendix F: Biographical Sketches of Committee Members and Staff." National Research Council. 2010. Strengthening the National Institute of Justice. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/12929.
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Appendix F
Biographical Sketches of Committee Members and Staff

Charles F. Wellford (Chair) is professor of criminology and criminal justice at the University of Maryland. He was chair of the Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice (formerly Institute of Criminal Justice and Criminology) from 1981 to 1995 and from 1999 to 2004. From 1992 to 1998 he was director of the Office of Academic Computing Services in the College of Behavioral and Social Sciences. He also served as acting dean of graduate studies and research, acting dean of continuing education, director of the Office of International and Executive Programs, and director of the Maryland Justice Analysis Center. He serves on numerous state and federal advisory boards and commissions. He is a past president (1995-1996) of the American Society of Criminology (ASC) and in 1996 was elected an ASC fellow. In 2001 he was selected to be a national associate of the National Research Council (NRC) of the National Academies. At the NRC, he chaired the Committee on Law and Justice from 1998 to 2004 as well as its panel on research on pathological gambling and panel on research on firearms. He currently serves on the Maryland Sentencing Policy Commission. From 1976 to 1981 he served in the Office of the U.S. Attorney General, where he directed the Federal Justice Research Program. The author of numerous publications on criminal justice issues, his most recent research has focused on the determinants of sentencing and the correlates of homicide clearance. He has a B.A. from the University of Maryland and a Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania.


George F. Sensabaugh, Jr. (Vice Chair) is professor of biomedical and forensic sciences in the School of Public Health at the University of California,

Suggested Citation:"Appendix F: Biographical Sketches of Committee Members and Staff." National Research Council. 2010. Strengthening the National Institute of Justice. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/12929.
×

Berkeley, and a member of the Graduate Group in Forensic Science at the University of California, Davis. His research interests include genetic variation and evolution in human and microbial populations and application of the biosciences in forensic science. His current lines of research include the comparative population genetics of the Staphylococci and the use of biological evidence in sexual assault investigation. He is also exploring the potential of microbial community profiling as a tool in forensic science. At NRC, he served on two Committees on DNA Technology in Forensic Science, in 1988-1992 and 1994-1996. He has held postdoctoral research positions at the University of California, San Diego, and at the National Institute of Medical Research in London. In 1993 he was awarded a Fulbright scholarship. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences, from which he received the Paul Kirk Award, Criminalistics Section, in 1987. He has a B.A. from Princeton University and a doctor of criminology from the University of California, Berkeley.


Charles E. Anderson, Jr., is director of the Engineering Dynamics Department in the Mechanical and Materials Engineering Division of the Southwest Research Institute. His expertise is in penetration mechanics, warhead mechanics, and hypervelocity impact; he has been recognized for his technical contributions and leadership in combining numerical simulations with experimental data to develop advanced models of the response of materials to shock, impact, and penetration. He has authored numerous reports for government and has served on a number of governmental advisory committees. He is a founding board member and the first president of the Hypervelocity Impact Society; a senior institute fellow of the Institute for Advanced Technology; and the regional editor (North America) of the International Journal of Impact Engineering. He received the Distinguished Scientist Award in 2000 and was elected a fellow of the American Physical Society in 2005. He has a Ph.D. in physics from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.


Betty M. Chemers (Study Director) is a senior project officer at NRC, which she joined in May 2005, after spending 30 years in the public and nonprofit sectors working on criminal justice and juvenile justice issues. She served as study director of the committee that issued the report Protecting Individual Privacy in the Struggle Against Terrorism in 2008. Previously she held numerous positions at the U.S. Department of Justice, including director of the evaluation division of the National Institute of Justice (NIJ) and deputy administrator for discretionary programs at the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, where she oversaw its research, demonstration, and training and technical assistance activities. Her non-federal service includes directing the planning and policy analysis division

Suggested Citation:"Appendix F: Biographical Sketches of Committee Members and Staff." National Research Council. 2010. Strengthening the National Institute of Justice. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/12929.
×

of the Maryland Department of Public Safety and Correctional Services and consulting on strategic planning, finance, and management issues with nonprofit organizations. She has an M.A. in history from Boston University and a B.A. in education/sociology from the University of Maryland.


Robert D. Crutchfield is professor and chair of the Department of Sociology and adjunct professor in the Department of American Ethnic Studies at the University of Washington. Previously he was acting associate dean of the Graduate School there. His current research focuses on social inequality as a cause of crime and racial inequality in the criminal justice system. Prior to his academic career, he was a juvenile probation officer and an adult parole officer in Pennsylvania. He also served on the Washington State Juvenile Sentencing Commission. He is a past vice president of the American Society of Criminology. He received the Fellows Award from the Western Society of Criminology in 2006. He has M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from Vanderbilt University.


Joel S. Engel is president of JSE Consulting and a member of the National Academy of Engineering. His expertise includes the theory and design of cellular telecommunications systems, wireless communications, high-speed data communications, video compression, and interactive video. He is also a senior executive with over 40 years of experience in the communications industry. He is a retired former chief technology officer of one of the regional Bell companies, where he was responsible for all aspects of the specification and management of the network technology. Prior to that, he spent 20 years at Bell Laboratories, where he headed the team that developed the first cellular telephone system architecture. For this achievement, he has been awarded the Alexander Graham Bell Medal of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers and the National Medal of Technology. He has a B.S. in electrical engineering from the City College of the City University of New York, an S.M. in electrical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and a Ph.D. in electrical engineering from the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn.


John L. Hagan is the John D. MacArthur professor of sociology and law at Northwestern University and codirector of the Center on Law and Globalization at the American Bar Foundation in Chicago. His research with a network of scholars spans topics from causes of crime to war crimes and human rights. Hagan is a former president of the American Society of Criminology and received Guggenheim, German Marshall Fund, and Russell Sage Foundation Fellowships, as well as the C. Wright Mills, Albert Reiss, and Michael J. Hindelang Awards. In June 2009, he received the Stockholm Prize in Criminology. He is the editor of the Annual Review of

Suggested Citation:"Appendix F: Biographical Sketches of Committee Members and Staff." National Research Council. 2010. Strengthening the National Institute of Justice. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/12929.
×

Law and Social Science. At NRC, he served on the Panel on Juvenile Crime: Prevention, Treatment, and Control and the Panel on High-Risk Youth. He has a B.A. from the University of Illinois at Chicago, and an M.A. and Ph.D (in sociology) from the University of Alberta.


Adele V. Harrell, an independent consultant, is the retired founding director of the Justice Policy Center at the Urban Institute. Her research over the past 35 years has focused on criminal justice responses to drug abuse and domestic violence. She served as codirector of the Evaluation of the Judicial Oversight Demonstration, a multisite longitudinal evaluation of court and community services to reduce intimate partner violence. Other large-scale experimental and quasi-experimental studies she has directed include evaluations of Children at Risk, a community-based drug prevention program, Breaking the Cycle Demonstration, a system-wide intervention for drug-involved felony defendants, the Superior Court of the District of Columbia’s Drug Intervention Program, and the Brooklyn Treatment Court, which provides drug court services for female offenders. She is a fellow of the Academy of Experimental Criminology, a member of the District of Columbia Sentencing Commission, and a former member of the National Advisory Panel for the Office of National Drug Control Policy. She has a Ph.D. in sociology from George Washington University.


David D. Jensen is associate professor in the Department of Computer Science and director of the Knowledge Discovery Laboratory at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Previously he served as an analyst in the Office of Technology Assessment (OTA), an analytical agency of the U.S. Congress. At OTA, he evaluated the potential of artificial intelligence technologies to detect money laundering and other kinds of fraud. His research focuses on machine learning and knowledge discovery in complex data sets, with applications to social network analysis and fraud detection, as well as causal inference techniques, computing and public policy, and research methods in computer science. He serves on the Executive Committee of the Association for Computing Machinery’s Special Interest Group on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining and on the program committees of the International Conference on Machine Learning and the International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining. He is an associate editor of ACM Transactions on Knowledge Discovery from Data. He was a member of the 2006-2007 Defense Science Study Group, and he currently serves on the Information Science and Technology Group of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). He has M.S. and D.Sc. degrees from Washington University in St. Louis.

Suggested Citation:"Appendix F: Biographical Sketches of Committee Members and Staff." National Research Council. 2010. Strengthening the National Institute of Justice. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/12929.
×

Tracey L. Meares is deputy dean and Walton Hale Hamilton professor at Yale Law School. Previously, she was Max Pam professor of law and director of the Center for Studies in Criminal Justice at the University of Chicago Law School. She has held positions clerking for the Honorable Harlington Wood, Jr., of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit and as a trial attorney in the Antitrust Division of the U.S. Department of Justice. At NRC, she has served on the Committee on Law and Justice since 2004. Her teaching and research interests focus on criminal procedure and criminal law policy, with a particular emphasis on empirical investigation of these subjects. Her legal research and writings on such issues as crime prevention reflect a civil society approach to law enforcement that builds on the interaction among law, culture, social norms, and social organization. She has a B.S. in general engineering from the University of Illinois and a J.D. from the University of Chicago Law School.


Edwin Meese III is distinguished fellow and holder of the Ronald Reagan chair in public policy at the Heritage Foundation. He served as the 75th attorney general of the United States from February 1985 to August 1988. Previously he was counselor to the president from 1981 to 1985. In this capacity he functioned as the president’s chief policy adviser, with management responsibility for the administration of the cabinet, policy development, and planning and evaluation. Formerly, he served as Governor Reagan’s executive assistant and chief of staff in California from 1969 through 1974 and as legal affairs secretary from 1967 through 1968. Before joining the governor’s staff in 1967, he served as deputy district attorney of Alameda County, California. His expertise centers on the U.S. legal system, law enforcement and criminal justice, intelligence and national security, and the Reagan presidency. His current interests focus on the criminal justice system, federalism, emergency response management, and terrorism. He is also a distinguished visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution, a member of the Board of Regents of the National College of District Attorneys, a distinguished senior fellow in the Institute for United States Studies at the University of London, and a member of the boards of directors of the Capital Research Center and the Landmark Legal Foundation. He is a graduate of Yale University and has a J.D. from the University of California, Berkeley.


Daniel S. Nagin is the Teresa and H. John Heinz III university professor of public policy and statistics in the Heinz School of Carnegie Mellon University. His research focuses on the evolution of criminal and antisocial behaviors over the life course, the deterrent effect of criminal and non-criminal penalties on illegal behaviors, and the development of statistical methods for analyzing longitudinal data. His work has appeared in such

Suggested Citation:"Appendix F: Biographical Sketches of Committee Members and Staff." National Research Council. 2010. Strengthening the National Institute of Justice. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/12929.
×

diverse outlets as the American Economic Review, the American Sociological Review, the Journal of the American Statistical Association, the American Journal of Sociology, the Archives of General Psychiatry, Criminology, Child Development, Psychological Methodology, the Law and Society Review, the Crime and Justice Annual Review, Operations Research, and the Stanford Law Review. Nagin is an elected fellow of the American Society of Criminology and of the American Society for the Advancement of Science. He is the 2006 recipient of the American Society of Criminology’s Edwin H. Sutherland Award (for research contributions) and is a 1985 recipient of the Northeastern Association of Tax Administrators Award for excellence in tax administration. He has a Ph.D. in urban and public affairs from Carnegie Mellon University.


Carol Petrie (Director, Committee on Law and Justice) was director of the Committee on Law and Justice until her retirement in 2009. In this capacity since 1997 she has developed and supervised a wide range of projects resulting in reports on juvenile crime, pathological gambling, transnational organized crime, prosecution, crime victimization, improving drug research, school violence, firearms, policing, and forensic science. Previously she served as the director of planning and management at NIJ, where she was responsible for policy development, budget, and administration. In 1994, she served as the acting director of NIJ. Throughout her career she has worked in the area of criminal justice research, statistics, and public policy at NIJ and the Bureau of Justice Statistics. She has conducted research on violence and public policy and managed numerous research projects on the development of criminal behavior, domestic violence, child abuse and neglect, and improving the operations of the criminal justice system. She has a B.S. in education from Kent State University.


Alex R. Piquero is professor in the College of Criminology and Criminal Justice at Florida State University. During preparation of this report, he was a professor in the Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice at the University of Maryland. Previously he was on the faculty of the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, the City University of New York, the University of Florida, Northeastern University, and Temple University. His areas of research have included criminal careers, juvenile violence, community policing, and criminal justice research methods. He has served on numerous committees, including the National Consortium of Violence Research, the MacArthur Foundation Research Program on Adolescent Development and Juvenile Justice, and the National Science Foundation Panel on the Future of Race and Crime. He is currently an investigator on the MacArthur Panel Study of Pathways to Desistance. His honors include the University of Florida Teacher of the Year Award and the American Society of Crimi-

Suggested Citation:"Appendix F: Biographical Sketches of Committee Members and Staff." National Research Council. 2010. Strengthening the National Institute of Justice. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/12929.
×

nology Young Scholar Award. He is executive counselor with the American Society of Criminology and also coeditor of the Journal of Quantitative Criminology. He has a Ph.D. in criminology and criminal justice from the University of Maryland.


Charles H. Ramsey is commissioner of the Philadelphia City Police Department. Previously he was chief of the Metropolitan Police Department of Washington, DC, from 1998 to 2006. A native of Chicago, he joined the Chicago Police Department as an 18-year-old cadet in 1968 and served in progressively more responsible positions for 30 years. While in Chicago, Ramsey was instrumental in designing and implementing the Chicago Alternative Policing Strategy, the city’s nationally acclaimed model of community policing. A nationally recognized innovator, educator, and practitioner of community policing, in Washington, DC, he refocused the force on crime fighting and crime prevention through a more accountable structure, new equipment and technology, enhanced strategy of community policing, and, since 9/11, new approaches to homeland security and counterterrorism. He has served as an adjunct professor at Lewis University and Northwestern University. A graduate of the FBI Academy, he has a B.A. and an M.A. (criminal justice) from Lewis University in Romeoville, Illinois.


Mary Ann Saar, an independent consultant, is the former secretary of the Maryland Department of Public Safety and Correctional Services. In this position, she supervised 12,000 employees from 12 agencies, including the Division of Corrections, and had responsibility for a budget exceeding $1 billion. Previously she served as state director for U.S. Senator Barbara A. Mikulski, associate commissioner for juvenile services for the Maine Department of Corrections, and secretary of the Maryland Department of Juvenile Services. She is an attorney by training, and her experiences with both adult and juvenile corrections as well as her familiarity with prosecutorial decision making have made her knowledge of criminal justice broad as well as deep. She received the E.R. Cass Award in 2007 from the American Correctional Association, the highest award nationally for a corrections practitioner. Her elected positions include president of the Council of Juvenile Correctional Administrators (2000) and Board of Governors, American Correctional Association (2002-2006). She has a B.A. in criminology/sociology from the University of Maryland, and an L.L.B. from the University of Maryland Law School.


Julie A. Schuck (Research Associate), has worked in the Division of Behavioral and Social Sciences and Education of NRC for over 7 years. She has provided research support for a number of projects and workshops, including ones on improving undergraduate instruction in science, technol-

Suggested Citation:"Appendix F: Biographical Sketches of Committee Members and Staff." National Research Council. 2010. Strengthening the National Institute of Justice. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/12929.
×

ogy, engineering, and mathematics; understanding the technical and privacy dimensions of information for terrorism prevention; and developing metrics for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security Science and Technology Directorate. Previously she was a research support specialist at Cornell University. She has an M.S. in education from Cornell University and a B.S. in engineering physics from the University of California, San Diego.


Jay A. Siegel is professor and chair of the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology and director of the Forensic and Investigative Sciences Program at Indiana University–Purdue University. His research interests include analysis of ink dyes, fibers, and cosmetic products. Currently, he is a member of the External Advisory Committee of the Deakin University Forensic Science Course (Victoria, Australia), and a fellow of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences. In 2005 he was awarded the Paul Kirk Award, Criminalistics Section, by the American Academy of Forensic Sciences. He has also served as president of the Council of Forensic Science Educators of the American Chemical Society. He has authored and coauthored numerous book chapters and articles on such subjects as textile fibers, forensic identification, and forensic science. At NRC, he currently serves on the Committee on Identifying the Needs of the Forensic Science Community. He has M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from George Washington University.


Carol H. Weiss is the Beatrice B. Whiting professor emerita of policy research at the Harvard University Graduate School of Education. She was a pioneer in the fields of evaluation methods, including theory-based evaluation, and the influence of research and evaluation on decisions. She has written many books, articles, and book chapters dealing with evaluation, uses of research in policy making, cross-national comparisons of research influence, legislative and bureaucratic obstacles to reliance on research, and media reporting of research. Her most recent research was a study of decision making by school districts about the choice of drug abuse prevention programs and the influence of evidence from evaluation studies on those decisions. One surprising finding was the frailty of the evaluation evidence on which many decisions were made. At NRC, she has served on 10 committees, including ones on NASA’s Elementary and Secondary Education Program, on assessing behavioral and social science research on aging, and on the federal role in education research. She is currently serving on the Committee on Field Evaluation of Behavioral and Cognitive Sciences-Based Methods for Intelligence and Counter-Intelligence. She has been a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study, a senior research fellow at the U.S. Department of Education, and a guest scholar at the Brookings Institution. She has a Ph.D. in sociology from Columbia University.

Suggested Citation:"Appendix F: Biographical Sketches of Committee Members and Staff." National Research Council. 2010. Strengthening the National Institute of Justice. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/12929.
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Suggested Citation:"Appendix F: Biographical Sketches of Committee Members and Staff." National Research Council. 2010. Strengthening the National Institute of Justice. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/12929.
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Suggested Citation:"Appendix F: Biographical Sketches of Committee Members and Staff." National Research Council. 2010. Strengthening the National Institute of Justice. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/12929.
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Suggested Citation:"Appendix F: Biographical Sketches of Committee Members and Staff." National Research Council. 2010. Strengthening the National Institute of Justice. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/12929.
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Suggested Citation:"Appendix F: Biographical Sketches of Committee Members and Staff." National Research Council. 2010. Strengthening the National Institute of Justice. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/12929.
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Suggested Citation:"Appendix F: Biographical Sketches of Committee Members and Staff." National Research Council. 2010. Strengthening the National Institute of Justice. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/12929.
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Suggested Citation:"Appendix F: Biographical Sketches of Committee Members and Staff." National Research Council. 2010. Strengthening the National Institute of Justice. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/12929.
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Suggested Citation:"Appendix F: Biographical Sketches of Committee Members and Staff." National Research Council. 2010. Strengthening the National Institute of Justice. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/12929.
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The National Institute of Justice (NIJ) is the nation's primary resource for advancing scientific research, development, and evaluation on crime and crime control and the administration of justice in the United States. Headed by a presidentially appointed director, it is one of the major units in the Office of Justice Programs (OJP) of the U.S. Department of Justice. Under its authorizing legislation, NIJ awards grants and contracts to a variety of public and private organizations and individuals.

At the request of NIJ, Strengthening the National Institute of Justice assesses the operations and quality of the full range of its programs. These include social science research, science and technology research and development, capacity building, and technology assistance.

The book concludes that a federal research institute such as NIJ is vital to the nation's continuing efforts to control crime and administer justice. No other federal, state, local, or private organization can do what NIJ was created to do. Forty years ago, Congress envisioned a science agency dedicated to building knowledge to support crime prevention and control by developing a wide range of techniques for dealing with individual offenders, identifying injustices and biases in the administration of justice, and supporting more basic and operational research on crime and the criminal justice system and the involvement of the community in crime control efforts. As the embodiment of that vision, NIJ has accomplished a great deal. It has succeeded in developing a body of knowledge on such important topics as hot spots policing, violence against women, the role of firearms and drugs in crime, drug courts, and forensic DNA analysis. It has helped build the crime and justice research infrastructure. It has also widely disseminated the results of its research programs to help guide practice and policy. But its efforts have been severely hampered by a lack of independence, authority, and discretionary resources to carry out its mission.

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