Congrats to lab member Cheyenne Hodgen, who was the recipient of the 2025 Gil Geis Award from the Department of Criminology, Law & Society at UC Irvine. This award recognizes excellence in research by a graduate student. Cheyenne received it for her research publications, including one as lead author and one as co-author published in Criminology. Congrats Cheyenne!
News
Three lab members defend dissertation prospectuses!
Congratulations to lab members Cheyenne Hodgen, Kyle Winnen, and Yuki Wang, all of whom successfully defended their dissertation prospectuses this spring, 2025.
Cheyenne’s dissertation project is titled, “Understanding Criminal Opportunity: Environmental Design, Routine Activities, and Temporal Patterns of Crime.”

Kyle’s dissertation project is titled, “The Subjective Experience of Inequality: Developing Critical Harm Theory to Examine How Social Structure and Culture Impact Violence, Social Reactions to Harm, and Civic Participation.”

Yuki Wang. Yuki’s dissertation project is titled, “Crime mobility and Spatial preferences: A Comparative Analysis through the Lens of Offender-centric Theories to Understand Victimization”.

Congratulations Dr. Tublitz!
Congratulations to lab member Rebecca Tublitz who successfully defended her dissertation on bail reform in Maryland this spring, 2025, and will be graduating in June.
Across three studies, Rebecca examines Maryland’s statewide bail reform to evaluate its effects on judicial decision-making and public safety, and to investigate how local court contexts shape pretrial outcomes. In the 1st study, she employs a regression discontinuity analysis to evaluate how bail reform affects judicial decision-making at the pretrial stage. In the 2nd study, she investigates the impact of bail reform on crime using a synthetic control group approach. In the final study, using multilevel modeling techniques, she analyzes how pretrial decision-making varies across court jurisdictions and explores how the social contexts of courts shape responses to new law.
Dr. Tublitz will continue conducting policy-related research at the Institute for State and Local Governance at the City University of New York.
Three new lab PhDs! Sola, Luo, and Forthun
Congrats to three of our lab members who successfully defended their dissertations this spring, 2024, and are off to bigger and better things at their new jobs.
Justin Sola defended his dissertation “Theory with Consequents”, and will now be an Assistant Professor at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill in the sociology department. Go Tar Heels!
Xiaoshuang Iris Luo defended her dissertation “Crime Changes and Spatial Patterns: Examination of Longitudinal Models of Crime across Multiple Cities in the U.S.”, and will now be an Assistant Professor at Akron University in the department of Criminal Justice Studies.
Benjamin Forthun defended his dissertation “Won’t You Be My Neighbor? An Examination of Environmental Context, Resident Neighborhood Spatial Perceptions, and Implications for Aggregate Techniques”, and will now be an Assistant Professor at the University of Northern Colorado in the department of Criminology and Criminal Justice.


Graduate student Kyle Winnen wins Gil Geis Award
Congrats to lab member Kyle Winnen, who was the recipient of the 2024 Gil Geis Award from the Department of Criminology, Law & Society at UC Irvine. This award recognizes excellence in research by a graduate student. Kyle received it for his three publications this year! Congrats Kyle!