Appendix
Biographical Sketches of Committee Members and Staff
Lawrence W. Sherman (Chair) is the Wolfson professor of criminology emeritus and director of the Police Executive Programme at the University of Cambridge Institute of Criminology. He previously served as head of the criminology departments at Cambridge, University of Pennsylvania, and University of Maryland, and as president of the American Society of Criminology, the American Academy of Political and Social Science, and the Academy of Experimental Criminology. He has designed or led over 50 randomized field experiments in police agencies on three continents, which formed the basis for his leadership of the global professional movement for evidence-based policing, notably through the U.K. Society for Evidence-Based Policing and its counterparts in Australia, New Zealand, the United States, and Canada. As one of six authors of the report to the U.S. Congress on Preventing Crime: What Works, What Doesn’t, What’s Promising, he wrote the chapter on the Maryland Scientific Methods Scale for rank-ordering the strength of evidence from impact evaluations, which has been adapted by a number of governments for their “what works” agendas on crime prevention. He has edited two volumes of the ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science on police and violence, most recently on reducing fatal police shootings. Sherman earned his Ph.D. in sociology from Yale University.
Beatriz Abizanda is a senior specialist in the citizen security cluster of the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB). Her professional experience spans the private and public sectors in Latin America and Europe. She has led the design, implementation, and technical advisory of major IDB
criminal justice reform projects in the citizen security sector. Her projects include police modernization, prison reform, and youth violence prevention components for programs in Belize, Brazil, Colombia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, and Uruguay. She has also co-authored the IDB’s conceptual framework and operational guidelines for citizen security and coexistence and contributed to the World Bank’s World Development Report. She is currently conducting meta-analytic research on the effectiveness of interventions for domestic violence perpetrators. She is a member of the jury of the Stockholm Prize in criminology and is on the editorial board of the Journal of International Criminology. Abizanda received a M.A. in criminology from the University of Cambridge and an MBA from Georgetown University.
Abigail Allen is an associate program officer with the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine’s Committee on Law and Justice. Previously, she worked during law school as a criminal defense law clerk, and as a legislative affairs intern and legal researcher with the Animal Legal Defense Fund. Her research and writing were centered on projects related to COVID-19’s impact on the factory farming industry and aquatic animal law issues. Allen received her B.A. in criminology, law, and society and a J.D. from George Mason University.
Emily Backes is associate director of the Committee on Law and Justice in the Division of Behavioral and Social Sciences and Education at the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. She has served as the study director for the reports The Promise of Adolescence: Realizing Opportunity for All Youth and Transforming the Financing of Early Care and Education. In her time at the Academies, she has directed studies and provided analytical and editorial assistance to projects covering a range of topics, including juvenile justice, policing, forensic science, illicit markets, science literacy, science communication, and human rights. Backes received an M.A. and B.A. in history from the University of Missouri, specializing in U.S. human rights policy and international law. She also received a J.D. from the University of the District of Columbia, where she represented clients as a student attorney with the Low-income Taxpayer Clinic and the Juvenile and Special Education Law Clinic.
Yanilda María González is an assistant professor of public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School. Her research focuses on policing, state violence, and citizenship in democracy, examining how race, class, and other forms of inequality shape these processes. Her book Authoritarian Police in Democracy: Contested Security in Latin America studies the persistence of police forces as authoritarian enclaves in otherwise democratic states,
demonstrating how ordinary democratic politics in unequal societies can both reproduce authoritarian policing and bring about rare moments of expansive reforms. Previously, she was an assistant professor at the School of Social Service Administration at the University of Chicago and has worked at a number of human rights organizations in the United States and Argentina, including the New York Civil Liberties Union, and Equipo Latino Américano de Justicia y Género. González received her Ph.D. in politics and social policy from Princeton University.
Guy Grossman is professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania. His research is in applied political economy, with substantive focus on governance, migration, security, and conflict processes. He is founder and co-director of the University of Pennsylvania’s Development Research Initiative, a member of the Evidence in Governance and Politics network, faculty affiliate of Stanford’s Immigration Policy Lab, and the University of Pennsylvania’s Identity & Conflict Lab. He designed and carried out field studies in a large number of developing countries, in collaboration with various international agencies, including the World Bank, the U.K. Department for International Development, the U.S. Agency for International Development, as well as with African governments and local non-governmental organizations. His work has appeared in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, International Organization, and Journal of Politics, among other journals. Grossman received his M.A. in political philosophy and LL.B. in law from Tel-Aviv University and a Ph.D. in political science from Columbia University.
John L. Hagan is the John D. MacArthur professor of sociology and law at Northwestern University, and his primary areas of expertise are in criminology, criminal justice, and international criminal law. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Royal Society of Canada. He is best known with coauthor Alberto Palloni for their mortality estimate of the Darfur genocide published in Science and his book co-authored with Wenona RymondRichmond on Darfur and the Crime of Genocide. He is also the author of Who Are the Criminals? The Politics of Crime Policy from the Age of Roosevelt to the Age of Reagan and with Bill McCarthy, Mean Streets: Youth Crime and Homelessness. He has received the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, the Stockholm Prize in criminology, the Harry Kalven Prize from the Law & Society Association, and the Cesare Beccaria Gold Medal from the German Society of Criminology. Hagan received his M.A. and Ph.D in sociology from the University of Alberta.
Karen Hall is deputy executive director at the Rule of Law Collaborative. Previously, she was associate professor and director of the master of law program in democratic governance and rule of law at the Ohio Northern University Pettit College of Law. She also served with the U.S. Department of State in its Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs. While there, she directed the development and management of assistance to the criminal justice system in Afghanistan as part of the overall U.S. foreign assistance initiative. She has also developed programs dealing with institutional reform, access to justice, protection of women’s rights, and legal education. She has lived at the U.S. Embassy in Kabul, Afghanistan, where she directly managed the State Department’s criminal justice and corrections programs. In recognition of her work, she earned multiple meritorious and superior honor awards from the State Department. Her teaching interests include international rule of law reform, international law, comparative criminal law, rule of law program design and management, student externship courses, and introduction to the American legal system. Her current research involves examining the consequences of the appropriations and administrative processes of the U.S. government in relation to rule of law reform worldwide. Hall received an M.A. in security studies from Georgetown School of Foreign Service and her J.D. from Harvard Law School.
Cynthia Lum is a professor of criminology, law, and society, and the director of the Center for Evidence-Based Crime Policy at George Mason University. She is a leading authority on evidence-based policing—an approach to policing reform advocating that research, evaluation, analysis, and scientific processes have “a seat at the table” in law enforcement policy making and practice. Her research focuses on improving law enforcement patrol and investigative operations through rigorous field research and evaluations. She has also developed numerous tools and strategies to translate and institutionalize research into everyday law enforcement activities. She is the author of Evidence-Based Policing: Translating Research into Practice, one of the leading volumes on the subject. She has trained thousands of police officers in the United States and around the world on evidence-based policing strategies and approaches, including for the State Department’s International Law Enforcement Academy. Lum received a Ph.D. in criminology and criminal justice from the University of Maryland, College Park.
Emily Owens is a professor of criminology, law, and society as well as economics at the University of California, Irvine. She studies a wide range of topics in the economics of crime, including policing, sentencing, and the impact of local public policies on criminal behavior. Her research examines how government policies affect the prevalence of criminal activity as well
as how agents within the criminal justice system, particularly police, prosecutors, and judges, respond to policy changes. She is engaged in ongoing research projects on police training, alcohol regulation, immigration policy, and local economic development programs. Owens received her Ph.D. in economics from the University of Maryland, College Park.
Sarah Perumattam is a senior program assistant with the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine’s Committee on Law and Justice and Board on Children, Youth, and Families. Her undergraduate research focused on disaster relief and humanitarian response, culminating in her senior capstone project, Improving HIV/AIDS Treatment in Humanitarian Response: Lessons Learned from Rwanda. She served as an international teaching assistants’ consultant at Brown’s Center for Language Studies and studied abroad in Seoul, South Korea, where she worked as a guest editor for the Yonsei University Annals. Perumattam graduated from Brown University with a bachelor’s degree in public policy and a specialization in government, law, and ethics.
Julie Anne Schuck (Study Director) is a senior program officer at the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. She has provided analytical, administrative, and editorial support for many studies and workshops and served as a technical writer for many reports. Her projects have covered a wide range of subjects, including law and justice issues; national security; STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematic) education; the science of human-system integration, workforce development, and the evaluations of several federal research programs. Notably, she was part of the staff team that supported the committee that produced the report The Growth of Incarceration in the United States: Exploring Causes and Consequences. Schuck has a B.S. in engineering physics from the University of California, San Diego, and an M.S. in education from Cornell University.
Justice Tankebe is a lecturer in criminology and a fellow at St. Edmund’s College, University of Cambridge. Prior to his current appointment, he was a teaching associate on the Police Executive Programme at the Institute of Criminology, Cambridge. His research interests lie in policing, legitimation and legitimacy, organisational justice, corruption, vigilantism and extralegal punishment, comparative criminology, sociology of law, and crime and criminal justice in sub-Saharan Africa. Tankebe’s current research projects include legitimacy and counter-terrorism policing, corruption among prospective elites, sentencing decision-making in Ghana, the death penalty in Africa, and police self-legitimacy. Tankebe received a Ph.D. in criminology from the University of Cambridge.
Sunia Young is a senior program assistant with the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine’s Committee on Law and Justice and Board on Children, Youth, and Families. She previously worked as a case manager at a Washington, DC-based behavioral health organization. Young also interned at the Carter Center’s Mental Health Program and with a DC-based organization that supports Asian women who have experienced domestic violence and sexual assault. Additionally, she has studied the Persian language extensively and spent the summer of 2018 in Tajikistan studying the Iranian and Tajik dialects of Persian through the United States Department of State. Young graduated from Davidson College with a bachelor’s degree in psychology and a minor in Arab studies.
