Criminology Research Center

Criminology Research Center Faculty Affiliates

Rachel LovellRachel Lovell is the Director of the Criminology Research Center. She received her Ph.D. in Sociology from the Ohio State University in 2007 and joined the Department of Criminology, Anthropology, and Sociology at Cleveland State University in 2021. She is an applied criminologist and methodologist whose research focuses on gender-based violence and victimization, particularly sexual assault, human trafficking, and intimate partner violence. She is currently directing large action research projects on untested sexual assault kits in Cuyahoga County, Ohio, in collaboration with the Cuyahoga County Prosecutor’s Office and Akron, Ohio, in partnership with the Akron Police Department, with funding provided by the Bureau of Justice Assistance's Sexual Assault Kit Initiative. She is co-editor of a forthcoming book with Jennifer Langhinrichsen-Rohling on untested sexual assault kits, Sexual Assault Kits and Reforming the Response to Rape.   
Elizabeth A. Babin received her Ph.D. from Arizona State University in 2009. Dr. Babin is an Assistant Professor in the School of Communication and her research examines the intersections of relational communication and health. She has published articles that examine communication-related risk and protective factors for intimate partner violence involvement and communication practices among advocates in domestic violence shelters. Dr. Babin is a trained Mediator and has mediated justice court cases in the past.
James J. Chriss received his Ph.D. in Sociology from University of Pennsylvania in 1994. He joined the faculty in 1999 after spending four years at Kansas Newman University where he developed their Criminal Justice Studies major. His main areas of interest are sociological and criminological theory, policing, law, juvenile delinquency, and the criminal justice system.
Ronnie Dunn is an associate professor of Urban Studies at Cleveland State University and alumni of the CSU Sociology Department. His research and teaching interests primarily focus on issues affecting minorities and the urban poor, with a particular emphasis on issues related to race, crime, and the criminal justice system. His research on racial profiling appears in the Urban Studies textbook, "The 21st Century American City: Race, Ethnicity and Multicultural Urban Life," and in the journal Public Performance & Management Review. This research led to the use of traffic cameras and an increase in the speed limit on 34 city streets in the city of Cleveland to reduce racial bias in traffic enforcement.
Dana J. Hubbard received her Ph.D. in Criminal Justice from the University of Cincinnati in 2002. She joined the Cleveland State faculty in 2003. Her research interests include correctional system involvement among women and girls and disparities related to race. She has published articles in top criminology journals such as Justice Quarterly and Crime and Delinquency. She is currently finishing up her 17-year ethnographic study of Black Women in the criminal justice system and a book is in preparation with an academic publishing company. She is also highly engaged in community work on domestic violence and children who witness violence.
Stephanie L. Kent received her Ph.D. in Sociology from the Ohio State University in 2005. She was on the faculty in Sociology at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas from 2005-2007. Her research focuses on the quantitative study of social control at macro levels of analysis. Drawing primarily on insights derived from conflict theories, she has examined the determinants of death sentences, executions, police force size, violence by and against the police, and interracial homicide. Her research has appeared in the journals Social Problems, the American Sociological Review, and Criminology.
Christopher A. Mallett teaches research methods, statistics, program evaluation, and mental health policy graduate and undergraduate courses in Cleveland State University's School of Social Work. He is licensed in Ohio as an independent social worker and attorney, and conducts trainings nationwide for juvenile court judges and other court personnel on disability law and juvenile delinquency. His research focuses on children and adolescents with certain disabilities and their involvement with juvenile courts; specifically the impact that mental health disorders, substance abuse, special education disabilities, and trauma/maltreatment victimization have on delinquency and crime. He has published over 35 research papers, book chapters, and law reviews, as well as a textbook (Linking disorders to delinquency: Treating high-risk youth in the juvenile justice system) on these topics. Before academe, Dr. Mallett worked for over a decade with at-risk children/adolescents and their families in Ohio, Maryland, and the District of Columbia. In addition, he had assisted in the resettlement of refugees/asylees and their families to this country, performed vocational counseling and job placement with numerous different populations, and was a marketing director and sales representative for two different companies.
Meghan A. Novisky received her Ph.D. in sociology from Kent State University in 2016 and joined CSU as an assistant professor of criminology in the same year. Her research investigates the health-related consequences of incarceration, conditions of confinement, and criminal justice policy and practice. Her research has been published in the journals Criminology, Justice Quarterly, Victims and Offenders, the Journal of Correctional Health Care, the Journal of Crime and Justice, and the Journal of Interpersonal Violence. Dr. Novisky also has five years of experience working in the field as a crime victim advocate and she continues to work as a curriculum training consultant for the University of Cincinnati’s Corrections Institute.
Wendy C. Regoeczi has a Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Toronto and recently completed her Master of Public Health. She has been studying the causes, consequences, and prevention of violent crime for more than two decades. Her research focuses on homicide, intimate partner violence, stalking, child abuse, and violent crime investigation and has been published in such journals as Social Forces, Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency, Quantitative Criminology, Child Abuse & Neglect, Journal of Forensic Sciences, and the Journal of Family Violence. She has secured funding for her research from the National Institute of Justice and the National Science Foundation, as well as numerous local and state grants. Dr. Regoeczi is a former editor of the journal Homicide Studies and served a four-year term on the Research Advisory Council of the International Association of Chiefs of Police.  She has significant experience in program evaluation, including serving on the evaluation team of the Court-Appointed Special Advocates Program and the federally funded Domestic Violence Homicide Prevention Demonstration Initiative. Dr. Regoeczi serves on a number of local committees, including the Cuyahoga County Domestic Violence Fatality Review, the Cleveland Homicide Commission Service Provider Review, the Cuyahoga County Domestic Violence Task Force, and the county’s Violence Against Women Act Allocation Committee.
Jill E. Rudd received her Ph.D. from Kent State University. Dr. Rudd is a professor of communication and has done extensive work in aggressive communication and violence. She has received several grants examining the role of aggression among incarcerated mothers, domestic violence victims and offenders, and in family violence. In addition, Dr. Rudd's research extends her study in conflict resolution in intercultural negotiations. She has written over 70 papers and journal articles and co-authored a book examining the role of communication and negotiation. Dr. Rudd has served on a variety of boards, including the State of Ohio Dispute Resolution and Conflict Management Commission, National Institute of Justice Research and Evaluation Consultant, U.S. Federal Department of Homeland Security, and the Cleveland Mediation Center.
Patricia Stoddard Dare earned her Ph.D. from the George Warren Brown School of Social Work at Washington University in St. Louis in 2004. She is also a former Mental Health Services Research Fellow for the National Institute of Mental Health. She joined the faculty in the School of Social Work at Cleveland State University in 2006. In addition to teaching courses in program evaluation, research methods, and substance abuse, Dr. Stoddard Dare is the Co-Coordinator of the Chemical Dependency Certificate Program. She has published many articles pertaining to the intersection of juvenile delinquency and gender, race, child abuse, substance abuse, mental health difficulties, and educational disabilities.
Miyuki Fukushima Tedor received her Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Oklahoma and subsequently joined Cleveland State University's Department of Criminology, Anthropology, and Sociology in 2009. Her research focuses on testing criminology theories between Japan and the U.S., alcohol and drug use, and the school-to-prison pipeline. She has recently co-authored Juvenile Delinquency: Pathways and Prevention with Christopher Mallett.
Valerie L. Wright earned her Ph.D. in Sociology from the Ohio State University in 2009 and joined the Department of Sociology and Criminology at Cleveland State University in 2012. She has a diverse background in research, policy evaluation, advocacy, and teaching. In addition, she has worked in corrections with both adults and juvenile offenders. Her research interests include racial and gender disparities in the criminal justice system, perceptions of injustice, and how the media differentially covers salient crime events based on the race of victims and offenders. Her publication titled The Blame Game: News Blame and Young Homicide Victims illustrates how the media frames homicide stories differently based on the race and gender of the victim.