Advancing Science — Newsletter from the NIJ Director

A few weeks ago, I had the honor of delivering the keynote at the launch of the Black and Brown Collective: Centering Community Solutions to Gun Violence. During the speech, I announced NIJ’s selection of John Jay College of Criminal Justice, a Hispanic and Minority-Serving Institution (MSI), to serve as a Center for Enhancing Research Capacity at MSIs to bolster MSI competitiveness in research and increase their scholarly contributions. This new award helps address immediate scientific funding and infrastructure gaps for MSIs. A longer-term goal of this initiative is to systematically develop science that reflects diverse experiences and perspectives of the people involved in the research landscape and criminal justice fields.

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Understanding the research and data on youth and delinquency is key to responding to youth misbehavior in ways that recognize their normative developmental process — with brain maturation continuing into early adulthood.

NIJ released a new “five things” fact sheet that provides insights into trends on youth engagement in crime and the justice system that can inform prevention and intervention strategies.

REVIEW FINDINGS

We also recently released a new report full of promising practices and recommendations to assist law enforcement professionals when interviewing potential trafficking survivors. This report underscores how the quality of investigative interviews with likely survivors of trafficking can have a significant impact in apprehending perpetrators. It also points to research gaps and a lack of effective evidence-based strategies that can inform future research directions.

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Last call to register for the 2024 NIJ National Research Conference! I encourage you to peruse the full agenda of our plenary sessions, panels, and presentations to plan out your days accordingly. I’ll see you in Pittsburgh, PA, on September 16!

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Roxanne Allen joins us as our newest grants management specialist in our Office of Grants Management. She comes to us from the Maryland State Department of Education, where she managed the Youth Development Branch for Program Compliance and Grant Management. She served as the primary extended learning specialist responsible for providing technical assistance and grant compliance oversight and management to local recipients of the $19M American Rescue Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief After-School Program grant. This also involved management of at least 43 subgrantees while managing Maryland’s Learning in Extended Academic Program (LEAP). Roxanne also served as the director of schools and community partnership in Baltimore, MD, where she managed community partnerships and programming in 10 public schools ranging from pre-K to 12th grade.

Sheena Gilbert joins us as our newest social science research analyst with expertise in Indigenous crime and victimization. She is a citizen of the Stockbridge Munsee Tribe and is an Indigenous criminologist. Her research focuses on victimology, specifically on gender-based violence (e.g., sexual assault, domestic violence, intimate partner violence), campus sexual violence, and victimization in underserved populations. Sheena has worked on several projects focusing on Missing or Murdered Indigenous Persons (MMIP). She recently completed a fellowship at the Justice Information Resource Network, where she helped grow their network with Native American researchers and Tribal coalitions and created infographics about MMIP and data sovereignty. Sheena has a master’s in criminal justice from Boise State University and is a Ph.D. candidate in the School of Criminology and Criminal Justice at the University of Nebraska, Omaha.

Tiffany Layne joins NIJ as a physical scientist in the Office of Investigative and Forensic Sciences. Tiffany has experience with body-fluid identification, microRNA targeting, microfluidics, isothermal PCR, and single cell technology as applied to forensic science. During her career, Tiffany has supported the Federal Bureau of Investigation as a postdoc research scientist for their Visiting Scientist Program. She was the lead researcher on several research projects and evaluations. Tiffany has a Ph.D. in chemistry from the University of Virginia, and a master’s of forensic science from Virginia Commonwealth University.

Yiping Li joins the NIJ Director’s Office as a Presidential Management Fellow, bringing an array of skills and experiences to the job. She has been a teaching assistant for a graduate-level class in evidence-based policymaking; served as a social impact fellow for the (Un)warranted Initiative, analyzing the impact of a court date notification system on appearance rates; worked as a summer graduate research fellow for The People Lab at Harvard’s Kennedy School, and was a senior policy associate for the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab at MIT, where she set and implemented priorities for the Lab’s Crime, Violence, and Conflict portfolio. Yiping is a Harvard graduate with a bachelor’s in psychology. She also earned a MicroMaster’s credential from MIT in data, economics, and development policy and most recently completed a master’s in public affairs in domestic policy from Princeton University.