Lab co-director Professor Charis Kubrin was a co-recipient of the 2026 Stockholm Prize in Criminology. This is a prestigious award given annually, and is criminology’s equivalent of the Nobel Prize. It is given for “outstanding achievements in criminological research or for the application of research results by practitioners for the reduction of crime and the advancement of human rights.” This prize is presented for Dr. Kubrin’s body of myth-busting scholarship on the topic of immigration and crime . Professor Kubrin will receive the prize on June 9, 2026 in Stockholm, and will give a talk in conjunction with the prize at the same time.

To see the announcement, go here. A short interview with Professor Kubrin begins around 14:45 in the video.

Congrats to lab member Elliott Alvarado, who was the recipient of the 2024 Kitty Calavita Best Second Year Project Award from the Department of Criminology, Law & Society at UC Irvine. His paper “Parental Assimilation and Adolescent Delinquency” provides a unique approach to the immigrant assimilation and offending literature by examining whether parental assimilation level effects the likelihood of offending among native-born adolescent youth. 

ILSSC is happy to welcome 2 new members to our team. Welcome to Esther Lin, who comes from Georgia, and to Chloe Ellis, who comes from right here in Irvine.

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”.