Bio

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Academic

I am currently a Senior Data Analyst for the NY Criminal Justice Agency, which is NYC’s principal pre-trial agency. I was hired to improve the research department’s use of machine learning methods. I am currently involved in three projects that I will describe here. First, I am working to quantify the causal effect of pre-trial detention on the probability of guilty pleas and convictions, sentence length, the probability of re-arrest after sentence completion. The work is supported by a three year grant from Arnold Ventures and is part of a larger mixed methods study to assess broad effects of pre-trial detention. I am leading the quantative side and my CV was included in the grant application. I am also continuing my work on asssessing the effects of notifying defendants of upcoming court dates. This study uses elastic nets, Lasso and Ridge regressions. Finally, I am evaluating the courtroom effects of Extended Pre-Arraignment Screening (EPASU) for persons with behavioral health issues.

I am also an adjunct lecturer in the department of Math and Computer Science at CUNY John Jay where I teach teach Programming Languages for Computer Science Majors. I will also be teaching statistics to NYPD Executive Officers (Captains and higher ranked officers) in John Jay’s new NYPD Executive MA Program in Criminal Justice. I am a PhD student in Criminal Justice at the CUNY Graduate Center. I have won fellowships from the CUNY Graduate Center, the University of Chicago and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaigne.

Advocacy and charitable work

Through Columbia University’s Center for Justice I have taught Python to detainees on Rikers Island. I have also mentored for the College Initiative, a project which helps people returning from prison access higher education. I am a member of (and have given at least one presentation at) the meetup groups NYC-D3-JS, NYC Python and Emacsnyc.

Resume

Here is a link to my resume. (EM).

Research Interests

I am interested in prisoner reentry and economic mobility broadly.

Publications

Here is a link to my google scholar page.

Social media