Sarah Tahamont is an Associate Professor at the University of Maryland, Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice. Dr. Tahamont received her Ph.D. from the Goldman School of Public Policy at the University of California, Berkeley in 2013, where she also received a Master’s in Public Policy (MPP) in 2009. During her time in the Bay Area, she also served on the faculty of the Prison University Project teaching Statistics, Algebra, Developmental Math and Developmental Composition in San Quentin State Prison. Prior to joining the faculty at UMD, Dr. Tahamont was a post-doctoral fellow at the School of Criminal Justice and the Rockefeller College of Public Affairs and Policy at the University at Albany, SUNY and an Embedded Scholar in the Office of Justice Research and Performance at the New York State Division of Criminal Justice Services (DCJS). 

Broadly, her research focuses on understanding the consequences of criminal justice policy interventions on individual and community outcomes, methodological advances in criminology and criminal justice, and exploring longitudinal patterns of criminal justice contact. One of the major concentrations of her research portfolio is to examine the ways that prison policy shapes individual outcomes both during incarceration and post-release. Since 2018, she has been collaborating with colleagues on grant funded field research projects. She is co-principal investigator on a $1M grant to fund the first experimental evaluation of higher education in prison. She is also a research affiliate of the University of Chicago Crime Lab.