2022  Recipient

Justin Lucas Sola

Justin Lucas Sola will begin his role as an assistant professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in Fall 2024, holding a joint appointment in the Sociology and the School of Data Science and Society. In Spring 2024, he will complete his PhD at the University of California Irvine's Criminology, Law & Society with an emphasis on race and justice. Passionate about research and teaching, he explores gun ownership and the interactions between the criminal justice system and inequality. Justin employs a variety of methods in his work, including preregistered experiments, random forests, longitudinal designs, semi-structured interviews, participant observation, and topic modeling.

2022  Recipient

Iris Luo

Xiaoshuang Iris Luo is a Ph.D. candidate in the department of Criminology, Law and Society at the University of California, Irvine. Her primary research interests include the community context of crime, criminal justice, mass incarceration and prisoner reentry, and social networks.
One of the large projects she is working on is her dissertation, Crime Changes and Spatial Patterns: Examination of Longitudinal Models of Crime across Multiple Cities in the U.S., which analyzes crime changes and spatial patterns across multiple cities in the U.S. This project mainly draws on social disorganization theory, crime pattern theory, routine activities theory, and urbansociology to explore how changes in neighborhood characteristics are associated with changes in crime longitudinally. Her work has been published in Criminology, Social Networks, Sociological Methodology, Journal of Interpersonal Violence, Police Quarterly, Policing: An International Journal, International Criminology, and The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

2023 Recipient

Ashley Lockwood

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2023 Recipient

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Dr. McKenzie L. Jossie is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at Louisiana State University. Her research interests include corrections, collateral consequences of justice system involvement, program evaluation, and criminal justice policy. As a criminologist, her research agenda examines the impact of criminal justice systems and processes on individuals, their families, and stakeholders using both qualitative and quantitative methods. Her most recent research has examined the collateral consequences faced by individuals on misdemeanor probation. Her work has been published in Criminal Justice and Behavior, Victims & Offenders, Journal of Criminal Justice Education, American Journal of Criminal Justice, the Encyclopedia of Adolescence, and the Encyclopedia of Research Methods in Criminology and Criminal Justice.

2024 Recipient

Carmen Diaz

Carmen Diaz is a doctoral candidate and applied mixed-methods researcher in the Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice at Indiana University Bloomington. Much of her work focuses on prosecution, the pretrial period, community supervision, and inequities in the criminal legal system. Her dissertation uses a mixed-methods approach to evaluate the impact of a pretrial diversion program on recidivism with attention to potential racial inequities in outcomes. Her recent work has appeared in the Journal of Criminal Justice, the Journal of Experimental Criminology, Corrections, and Crime & Delinquency. 

2024 Recipient

Kelsey Kramer

Kelsey L. Kramer is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Criminal Justice and Criminology at Sam Houston State University. Her research focuses on inequalities in the criminal legal system, particularly in punishment and discretionary decision-making, with the goal of creating a more equitable legal system. Her dissertation work bridges sociology, fat studies, criminology, and criminal justice. It uses feminist and intersectional theories and quantitative methods to examine whether body size, gender, and race/ethnicity influence sentencing outcomes in a large southern county. Through her dissertation work, she has begun establishing a subfield called "Fat Criminology," which seeks to examine how cultural stigmatization of fatness, along with intersecting factors like race (racism) and gender (patriarchy), may contribute to surveillance, punishment, and criminalization in the legal system. Her work is published in outlets like Justice Quarterly, Crime & Delinquency, and Criminal Justice and Behavior.

2025 Recipient

Carl Reeds

Carl L. Reeds is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Criminology at the University of South Florida. His research focuses on racial and ethnic disparities in the criminal justice system, the relationship between communities and crime, and the influence of policy and legislation on criminal justice outcomes. His dissertation uses a causal quasi-experimental approach to examine the influence of prosecutors' philosophy (i.e., policies) on arrests generally and racial disparities in arrests. His recent work has appeared in journals such as Race and Justice and the Journal of Quantitative Criminology. 

2025 Recipient

Maya Moritz

 Maya Moritz is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Criminology at the University of Pennsylvania, where her work focuses on the effect of legal, technological, and place-based changes including street art and lighting on crime. She is an embedded researcher at the Philadelphia District Attorney's Office and completed her B.Sc. in Economics at the University of St. Andrews and her M.Sc. in Economics at Universität Mannheim. She has also served in research assistance and science communications roles at the Heidelberg Institute for Geoinformation Technology, the GESIS-Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences, and the St. Andrews School of Economics. Her current project uncovers significant falls in crime following the installation of public murals and traces the theory of change for street art as a crime prevention tool.