News and Events

Recipients of our 2023 awards can be found in the Awards Ceremony program:

Recipients of our 2022 awards can be found in the Awards Ceremony program:

Recipients of our 2021 awards can be found in the Awards Ceremony program:

2019 Award Recipients

Dr. Arthur and Elaine Niederhoffer Memorial Fellowship
Jennifer Peirce is a doctoral candidate in Criminal Justice at John Jay College. Her dissertation research project is a mixed-methods analysis of the recent human rights-oriented prison reform process in the Dominican Republic, with a focus on incarcerated people’s perceptions of their conditions. Jennifer is also a doctoral Scholar with the Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation in Canada. Previously, she worked on projects related to criminal justice system reform, violence prevention, and post-conflict issues in Latin America and the Caribbean with the Inter-American Development Bank, the Canadian Department of Foreign Affairs, and several NGOs. Jennifer holds an M.A. from the Norman Paterson School of International Affairs at Carleton University (Ottawa, Canada) and a B.A. in International Development Studies and Spanish from Dalhousie University (Halifax, Canada).

Jacqueline Scott enrolled in John Jay's PhD Program in 2015 after being employed as a law enforcement crime analyst for the Royal Canadian Mounted Police for several years, bringing with her an interest in the applications of criminal justice data as well as a focus on violent offending and criminal desistance. She has a BA from the University of Lethbridge and a Master's from the University of Edinburgh. Jackie has been involved in several collaborative projects with faculty since that time with a focus on data analysis and management, including the Jail Escapes and Risky Facilities project with Dr. Mellow and Dr. Petrossian and Understanding the Causes of School Violence, part of the Extremist Crime Database project with Dr. Freilich. She has also worked with the Research Network on Misdemeanor Justice and the United Nations University's Children and Extreme Violence Project. She is currently working on her dissertation proposal, which will focus on the descriptive and predictive power of social media and social news relating to major criminal events such as school shootings, mass shootings, terror attacks and police-community conflict. Her research interests include terrorism, violence, international CJ, desistance, virtual responses to crime and the nexus between online communities and offline criminal justice.

Dr. James Fyfe Memorial Fellowship
Shamus Smith is a 4th year doctoral student in the criminal justice PhD program, specializing in policy, oversight, and administration.  His research interests include examining female attrition rates in police academies throughout the U.S., as well as prosecutorial discretion among immigrant victims of domestic violence.  Shamus holds an M.A. in Criminal Justice from John Jay College, and holds a B.A. in Sociology from the University of the Pacific.  In addition to his academic pursuits, he currently serves in the New Jersey National Guard, and has formerly served in the United States Marine Corps.  He was a police officer with the NYPD for over 10 years, and is now an assistant inspector general for the New York City Department of Investigation, Office of the Inspector General for the NYPD.       


Dr. Gerald W. Lynch Memorial Scholarship
Monique Sosnowski is a first year criminal justice doctoral student at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice. She specializes in global wildlife conservation and wildlife crime, with particular interests in illegal wildlife trade, poaching, and African park security. Her recent research has focused on identifying parallels between the illegal ivory and narcotics markets, determining concentrations within wildlife contraband seizures across the US and EU, establishing the current status of conservation technology, and detecting patterns of federally tried wildlife cases in the US. Monique holds an MSc in Global Wildlife Health and Conservation from the University of Bristol. 

Outstanding Dissertation Award
Sarah Picard earned her PhD in Criminal Justice from the Graduate Center at the City University of New York.  Dr. Picard’s dissertation research explores the effects of neighborhood ecology on recidivism, with a focus on order-maintenance policing and concentrated disadvantage. She is also currently a Research Director with the Center for Court Innovation. Her recent work with the Center focuses on policy-level reform in the adult criminal justice context and how research evidence can best be translated into practice. She has authored numerous papers on system reform efforts, including a recent study that models the impact of actuarial risk assessment tools on racial disparities in pretrial outcomes.