Rachel Ellis is an Associate Professor of Criminology and Criminal Justice at the University of Maryland. She is also a Faculty Associate of the Maryland Population Research Center and a Faculty Affiliate in the Department of Sociology. She currently serves as the Director of the CCJS Undergraduate Honors Program.

Dr. Ellis researches women's experiences of punishment in the United States. Using qualitative methods – especially ethnography and interviews – her work has focused on prisons, reentry, probation, surveillance, and inequality. She has also published on organizational theories of prisons and best practices in qualitative methodology. Her book, In This Place Called Prison: Women's Religious Life in the Shadow of Punishment (University of California Press), has been recognized with awards from the American Society of Criminology, the American Sociological Association, and the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion. Dr. Ellis' scholarship has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the Russell Sage Foundation, and Mellon/ACLS, among others. Current projects include an interview study of women's experiences on probation and a mixed-methods study of the impacts of parental incarceration on the next generation.