We would love to hear about our alumni's accomplishments. Please send an email to ccjs-admin [at] umd.edu. The information will be posted on this webpage and shared with our Department faculty and students.
The Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice alumni chapter is part of the College of Behavioral and Social Sciences. Please check out the College of Behavioral and Social Sciences Official Alumni Web Site.
List of Alumni Accomplishments:
6/24/2024
Zachary Nemser (B.A. 2006) was awarded the 2024 Top Cop Award by the Maryland Police Executives Association.
02/21/2024
Georgiana Willems (B.A. 2023) integrates her extensive experience as an EMT and firefighter with the skills honed during her undergraduate studies at the University of Maryland. Recognized for her leadership qualities, Willems was awarded the prestigious J. Edgar Hoover Foundation Leadership Scholarship, reflecting her dedication to serving communities and pursuing a career in law enforcement.
1/20/2024
Steven Krein (B.A. 1992)has been honored with the EnTERPreneur Award celebrating his business which is fearlessly disrupting its industry.
1/20/2024
Chip Sollins (B.A. 1982) has been honored with the Terp Legacy Award for Alumni Excellence.
12/5/2023
Cortney Fisher (Ph.D. 2014) a lecturer in the Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice at the University of Maryland, was honored as the "Guest Coach of the Game" by the Women’s Basketball team for her exemplary support of undergraduate students both inside and outside the classroom.
8/26/2022
Bo Jiang (Ph.D. 2019) joined the Department of Sociology at the University of Macau as an Assistant Professor in the fall of 2022. His interests are in applying methods from computational sciences to address policy-relevant issues within criminology and criminal justice.
8/10/2022
Alex Piquero (B.A. 1992; M.A. 1994; and Ph.D. 1996) The Office of Justice Programs Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General Amy L. Solomon announced today that President Biden has appointed Dr. Alex R. Piquero as Director of the Bureau of Justice Statistics. As many of you know, Alex is a graduate of our undergraduate and graduate programs as well as a former professor here at UMD. Most recently, he has been serving as a professor and chair of sociology at the University of Miami.
6/27/2022
Shelby Hickman (Ph.D. 2021) was featured as a lead discussant in an episode titled “The understudied pathways into labor trafficking” on The Center for Justice Research and Innovation’s (CNA) podcast, Justice Talks. Dr. Hickman led a discussion with Dr. Scott Decker and Dr. Joan Reid about the victims and perpetrators of labor trafficking, methods of measuring and defining the issue of labor trafficking, and methods of comprehensively addressing the phenomenon.
5/25/2022
Laura Wyckoff (Ph.D. 2011) has been named the Chief of Staff at PERF (Police Executive Research Forum). Dr. Wyckoff will provide senior leadership and executive-level advice to the Executive Director and address high-level issues across a wide range of activities.
4/29/2022
Jeff Kinney (B.A. 1993) was inducted into the Alumni Association Hall of Fame. Jeff is recognized for his significant, positive impact on society, as well as his efforts to instill Maryland pride and reflect the core values of the university. A talented author and cartoonist, Jeff Kinney created a cultural phenomenon with his #1 New York Times bestselling cartoon fiction series Diary of a Wimpy Kid. Kinney is widely credited with converting children into readers, an achievement which has recognized him as one of Time magazine’s most influential people in the world.
9/1/2021
Shelby Hickman (Ph.D. 2021) works as a Research Scientist at CNA Corporation. Dr. Hickman served as a Co-Director on a COPS Office-funded study examining innovative uses of technology in law enforcement and a Co-Investigator on NIJ funded study examining juvenile justice responses to the COVID-19 pandemic.
6/7/2021
Megan Augustyn (Ph.D. 2013) receives President’s Distinguished Achievement Award in Research Achievement from UTSA. Dr. Augustyn received two grants from the National Institute of Justice (NIJ), the top federal funding agency for criminology and criminal justice research. The first grant allows Dr. Augustyn to expand on her work using data from The Rochester Youth Development Study. Dr. Augustyn’s efforts secured $1.88 million to continue the study, the largest external award received by the College for Health, Community and Policy. Dr. Augustyn also secured over $745,000 from an NIJ GREAT grant for her project to inform programming services and improve retention rates for students who are victims of crime. The current study follows a cohort of 2,400 freshman college students at minority-serving institutions to examine both how often students report victimization both on and off-campus and the financial costs associated.
6/1/2021
Mei Yang (Ph.D. 2021) joined the Crime and Justice Institute (CJI) as a Data and Policy Specialist. Dr. Yang is part of CJI’s pretrial team and works on several projects analyzing front-end data to improve pretrial systems.
6/1/2021
Holly Nguyen (Ph.D. 2015) was promoted to Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology and Criminology, and School of Public Policy at the Pennsylvania State University.
4/10/2021
Madeline Romm (M.A. 2021) works as a Faculty Specialist and Researcher at the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START) at the University of Maryland, College Park (UMD). Dr. Romm is a member of the irregular warfare and near-peer competition team.
10/3/2020
Jessica Deitzer (Ph.D. 2020) works as a Postdoctoral Researcher for the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Crime, Security, and Law. Dr. Deitzer’s research contextualizes criminal decision-making research with self, social, and environmental factors. Currently, she studies how harsh and unpredictable environments can lead to short-term mindsets and crime.
9/2/2020
Alex Piquero (B.A. 1992; M.A. 1994; and Ph.D. 1996) CCJS Alumni Dr. Alex Piquero was featured on the CrimComm Convos series with Aili Malm which addressed topics about public criminology, mentoring, and the guild that is academia.
8/2/2019
Mateus Rennó Santos (Ph.D. 2019) joined the Department of Criminology at the University of South Florida (USF) as an Assistant Professor in the fall of 2019. His research focuses on crime and criminal justice trends, particularly on the drivers of changes in the rates of violence of populations, and on testing macro-level criminological theory.
6/1/2019
Paul Mazerolle (Ph.D. 1995) was recently appointed the university's 19th president and vice-chancellor of the University of New Brunswick (Canada).
4/26/2019
Florent “Flo” Groberg (B.A. 2006) was inducted into the Hall of Fame. Groberg enlisted in the U.S. Army in 2008 and received a Medal of Honor in 2015, the United States’ highest military decoration, for heroic actions taken during battle in Afghanistan in 2012, when he disrupted two suicide bombers. He is now chief of staff at Boeing Commercial Airplanes in Seattle.
4/18/2019
Chae Jaynes (Ph.D. 2018) joined the Department of Criminology at the University of South Florida (USF) as an Assistant Professor in the fall of 2018. Her research focuses on examining offender decision-making from a rational choice perspective.
10/10/2018
Alex Piquero (B.A. 1992; M.A. 1994; and Ph.D. 1996) Dr. Alex Piquero was interviewed on the #1 Criminologist in the world, for his podcast series on race, violence, and medicine to talk about his criminological research in addition to his life story.
12/18/2016
Kathryn Noe Kozey (Ph.D. 2015) joined the faculty at Western New England University in the Department of Criminal Justice and Sociology in the fall of 2015. She will continue her work on crime in urban areas, collective efficacy, and gentrification.
4/18/2016
Alex Piquero (B.A. 1992; M.A. 1994; and Ph.D. 1996) was selected as the recipient of the Western Society of Criminology (WSC) "President's Award" for his contributions to the field of criminology and positive influence on the current WSC president's career.
2/24/2016
Alex Piquero (B.A. 1992; M.A. 1994; and Ph.D. 1996) was recently featured in an article by nationally syndicated columnist Esther J. Cepeda for NBC News. The article is titled "What I've Learned: Our Talk with Top-Ranked Criminologist Alex Piquero" and highlights an interview with Piquero about his life and career, including his decision to choose a career in Criminology and his time at the University of Maryland. To read the article, please follow this link.
10/28/2015
Bret Bucklen (Ph.D.) will receive the Practitioner Research Award from the American Society of Criminology's Corrections and Sentencing Division at this year's ASC annual conference. The Division of Corrections and Sentencing has initiated a new award aimed at recognizing excellent social science research that is conducted in government agencies to help that agency develop better policy or operate more effectively. The emphasis will be placed on research concerning community corrections, institutional corrections, or the judiciary conducted by a researcher or policy analyst employed by a government agency (federal, state, or local).
7/20/2015
Holly Nguyen (Ph.D. 2015) will be joining the faculty at the Pennsylvania State University in the Department of Sociology and Criminology. She plans to continue her work on rewards from crime, groups, and crime and illicit drug markets.
6/10/2015
Jan Hudson (M.A. 2015) now works for the Federal Judiciary for the Southern District of Iowa.
6/5/2015
John McDonald (M.A. 1996 and Ph.D. 1999) was recently promoted to Professor of Criminology and Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania. John is also Chair of the Department of Criminology at the University of Pennsylvania.
3/31/2015
Megan Myers (B.A. 2014) is currently pursuing a master's in intelligence management at the University of Maryland University College with a graduation date of Spring 2016. Megan currently works for the University of Maryland Police Department as a police dispatcher and 911 operator.
3/27/2015
Nicole Leeper Piquero (M.A. 1998, and Ph.D. 2001) promoted to Associate Provost at the University of Texas at Dallas.
3/27/2015
Alex Piquero (B.A. 1992; M.A. 1994; and Ph.D. 1996) promoted to Associate Dean for Graduate Programs at the University of Texas at Dallas.
2/24/2015
Kyle Thomas (Ph.D. 2015) recently joined the Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice at the University of Missouri-St. Louis (UMSL). His research focuses on the influence that peers have on the etiology of delinquent behavior, with a current focus on how the normative influence of friends affects the types of crimes adolescents commit. At UMSL, he teaches criminological theory and research methods.
01/22/2014
Katie Zafft (Ph.D. 2014) is now working on sentencing and corrections reforms at the Public Safety Performance Project at The Pew Charitable Trusts.
01/22/2014
Joshua Bittinger (M.A. 2014) is currently pursuing his doctorate in Higher Education at the University of Massachusetts - Amherst. My current research interests fall in the intersection of academic integrity and moral development on college campuses, particularly among graduate students. My focus on graduate students stems from the likelihood that these students will engage in research in the future, and it is important that they do so ethically and with integrity. My degree from the CCJS department has greatly prepared me in terms of research methods, enabling me to become part of several research initiatives on campus already. Additionally, my research interests could be regarded as a sort of crime against the tenets of higher education, as such the theories I studied during my time at Maryland continually arise as I consider the motivations for, consequences of, and approaches to the reduction of academic dishonesty on college campuses.
12/10/2014
Nicole Leeper Piquero (M.A. 1998, and Ph.D. 2001) recently won the Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences (ACJS), a national association for criminology and criminal justice, election for 2nd VP (for 2015-2016) which means Dr. Leeper Piquero will become 1st VP (2016-2017) and then President (2017-2018) of the association.
9/17/2014
Alex Piquero (B.A. 1992; M.A. 1994; and Ph.D. 1996) was presented the Ashbel Smith Professor of Criminology at the University of Texas, and earned a 2014 Regents' Outstanding Teaching Award along with 90 fellow faculty members from across the UT System’s 15 academic and health institutions.
6/9/2014
Mariel Alper (Ph.D. 2014) will be working for the next three years as a research fellow at the Robina Institute of Criminal Law and Criminal Justice at the University of Minnesota Law School. Her research on probation and parole is part of the Sentencing Law and Policy program area, which aims to participate in and influence large-scale, systemic improvements in sentencing law and policy.
6/5/2014
Sarah Boonstoppel (Ph.D. 2014) has accepted a tenure track position at North Dakota State University as an Assistant Professor of Criminal Justice in the Department of Criminal Justice and Political Science. She plans to continue her research on continuity and change in early young adulthood, and is especially interested in exploring variation in the relationship between desistance from crime and different types of social support.
Sarah Greenman (Ph.D. 2014) will be working as a professor at Hamline University in the Department of Criminal Justice and Forensic Science. She will be teaching courses such as Criminal Justice, Criminology, and Victimology and will continue her research on deterrence, sanctions, and intimate partner violence.
6/02/14
Dawn Daggett (Ph.D. 2014) has been working for the Federal Bureau of Prisons for almost 15 years in the Office of Research. She plans to continue to do research in the field for the foreseeable future, unless a better offer comes her way. She also hopes to be able to also teach some classes
5/28/14
David Mazeika (Ph.D. 2014) will be joining the faculty at The College of New Jersey this fall. He would like to thank the CCJS faculty, staff, and graduate students for all the support they have provided throughout his time at Maryland.
5/28/14
Hattie Jones (M.A. 2014) has accepted an offer of a training contract at the international commercial law firm Clifford Chance, and will return to the U.K. to gain her law degree before starting work at their London headquarters in February 2016.
02/12/12
Dr. Christopher Koper (Ph.D. 1995, MA 1992, and B.A. 1988) was quoted by four news sources for the landmark research conducted when he was a graduate student at CCJS. Dr. Koper is an Associate Professor at the Center for Evidence-Based Crime Policy at the Department of Criminology, Law, and Society, at George Mason University. He was a protege of Dr. Lawrence Sherman who was head of the Department when Chris was an undergraduate. Chris was also a featured speaker at the recently concluded Gun Summit at Johns Hopkins University's Bloomberg School for Public Health in Baltimore.
- http://www.salon.com/2013/01/30/wayne_lapierre_hopes_you_dont_read_that_study_he_mentioned/
- http://www.newrepublic.com/article/112296/nra-and-assault-weapons-ban-how-improve-it#
- http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/24/obama-gun-plan_n_2544155.html
11/26/12
Nicole Leeper Piquero (M.A. 1998, and Ph.D. 2001) has recently been appointed Associate Dean for Graduate Education at the University of Texas at Dallas School of Economic, Political and Policy Science (EPPS). Dr. Denis Dean, Dean of EPPS, stated, "Dr. Piquero has the skills, experience, and energy to do an outstanding job in her new position."
9/24/12
Nicole Leeper Piquero (M.A. 1998, and Ph.D. 2001) was named one of the top-performing female academics in the field of Criminology by the Journal of Criminal Justice Education.
9/10/12
John MacDonald (Ph.D. 1999) was awarded the Kershaw Prize by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management.
6/27/12
Brad Bartholomew (Ph.D. 2012) has accepted a teaching position with the American University, Washington, D.C.
6/7/12
Jennifer Gibbs (Ph.D. 2011) is the recent winner of the 2012 Richard Block Outstanding Dissertation Award from the Homicide Research Working Group. Dr. Gibbs is currently an Assistant Professor at the Department of Criminal Justice at West Chester University in Pennsylvania. Congratulations Jennifer!
7/29/2011
Adam Braskich (B.A. 2007), CCJS double major and CIVICUS alumni, has been accepted at Harvard Law School this upcoming semester. Adam has spent the last three years working as an officer for the Baltimore Police Department. Please join us in congratulating our fellow Terp!
5/5/2011
Bianca Bersani (Ph.D. 2010), Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Massachusetts Boston, was awarded the University of Maryland Distinguished Dissertation Award at the University of Maryland Graduate School Fellowship & Award Celebration for her thesis entitled “Are Immigrants Crime Prone? A Multifaceted Investigation of the Relationship between Immigration and Crime in Two Eras”. This award recognizes original work that makes an unusually significant contribution to the discipline of the student, and is judged on both methodological and substantive quality.
4/13/2011
Frederic G. Reamer, (B.A. 1974) of the department (then known as the Institute of Criminal Justice and Criminology), has been quoted in the article "It Could happen to You" in The Conference Board Review. Dr. Reamer received his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago and has served as a social worker in correctional and mental health settings and taught at the University of Chicago, School of Social Service Administration and the University of Missouri-Columbia, School of Social Work. He is currently a professor of social work in the graduate School of Social Work, Rhode Island College, and a member of the Rhode Island Parole Board.
12/7/2009
Angela Gover (M.A. 1992, and Ph.D. 2000) is an associate professor at the University of Colorado Denver, who won the UCD 2009 "Excellence in Research and Creative Activities Award" for the Downtown Campus. The university gives awards within each college for excellence in teaching, research, and service. She won the award from the School of Public Affairs before competing with the recipients of the award from other colleges on campus. Angela obtained her Ph.D. in Criminology and Criminal Justice from the University of Maryland, College Park in May of 2007, and we are happy to congratulate her on this achievement!
9/9/2009
Stephen E. Vance (Ph.D. expected December 2009) has joined the Supreme Court Fellows Program from the District of Columbia Sentencing and Criminal Code Revision Commission. As a staff attorney, he has assisted with the oversight and implementation of a new sentencing guidelines system in both the legal and policy analysis of sentencing and post-conviction issues, in addition to having several papers sentencing on guidelines and reform published.
9/3/2009
Lee Ann Slocum (M.A., 2004; and Ph.D. 2007) won the Gerald and Deanne Gitner Excellence in Teaching Award at the University of Missouri St. Louis. This award recognizes and honors early-career faculty for outstanding and innovative teaching. An award plaque and honorarium of $500 is presented at the Chancellor's State of the University Address in the Fall Semester. Recipients are first- or second-year tenure track faculty. Slocum is a faculty member in the Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice.
3/23/2009
Daniel Lee, (B.A. 1991, and Ph.D. in 2001) will be receiving federal funding for the launch of a Correctional Education Clearinghouse and Educational Program at the Indiana University of Pennsylvania, where he is an associate professor. He will be co-directing the program. The goal of the project is to reduce recidivism, increase the employability of inmates upon release, and strengthen the capabilities of the teachers.
3/18/2009
Lt. Paul Starks, Director of Media Services Division of the Montgomery County Police Department, was nominated in the fifth annual America’s Most Wanted “All-Star” Contest. Starks received his Bachelor of Arts from CCJS in 1980 and has been working with the MCPD since 1985. He has helped take the MCPD above and beyond the call of duty by connecting them and the local community with the creation of his “Most Wanted” webpage and his help in the development of the “Be On The Lookout” television program.
