Research Fellows

Peng Chen

Associate Professor, Information Engineering and Cyber Security, People's Public Security University of China

Phone: +86 1861.216.5961 · E-Mail: chenpeng@ppsuc.edu.cn

Dr. Peng Chen is an Associate Professor at the People's Public Security University of China's (PPSUC) School for Information Engineering and Cyber Security and a Research Fellow with the National Center for Spectator Sports Safety and Security at The University of Southern Mississippi. His research interests include crime pattern analysis, civil disorder at mass gatherings, crime and disorder simulation, and risk assessment. He has presented his research at numerous national and international conferences including the International Conference on Fuzzy Systems and Knowledge Discovery, Proceedings of GIS research UK, the International Conference on Computational Science and Its Applications, International Conference on Information, Intelligence, Systems and Applications. Peng has published peer-reviewed articles in Security Journal, Professional Geographer, Crime Law and Social Change, as well as numerous IEEE conference papers. He is currently working on research projects funded by various scientific research foundations, including the Natural Science Foundation, Beijing Science Foundation, and National Key R & D Programs.

Peng holds a Bachelor's degree in Chemical Process Machinery and a Master's in Safety Technology and Engineering both from Dalian University. He conducted his doctoral training at Tsinghua University where he obtained his PhD in Engineering Physics. In addition to his time at Tsinghua University, he was a visiting scholar at University College London's prestigious Jill Dando Institute for Security and Crime Science where he developed various agent-based models for simulations. Dr. Chen's dissertation entitled "Agent-based Modeling and the Simulation of Crime Hotspots", explored the development of a realistic framework that accounted urban complexities such as the street network, individual characteristics, and the impact of police presence on the occurrence and clustering of crime patterns.

Jon Garland

Professor of Criminology, Head of Department of Sociology, University of Surrey

Phone: +44 1483.682829 · E-Mail: j.garland@surrey.ac.uk

Jon Garland is Professor of Criminology in the Department of Sociology at the University of Surrey, where he is also Head of Department. He has conducted extensive research into hate crime, and in particular the nature, frequency and impact of victimization and how criminal justice agencies deal with incidents of hate crime. He has also examined the nature and impact of the targeted victimization of alternative subcultures. In addition, he has investigated the activities, impact and membership of far-right groups such as the English Defence League (EDL), as well as racism in rural and isolated areas of England, policing, and racism, anti-racism and disorder in football (soccer).

He has published six books: Rural Racism, Responding to Hate Crime: The Case for Connecting Policy and Research, and Hate Crime: Impact, Causes, and Consequences (all with Neil Chakraborti), Racism and Anti-racism in Football (with Mike Rowe); The Future of Football (with Mike Rowe and Dominic Malcolm), Youth Culture, Popular Music and the End of 'Consensus' (with the Subcultures Network). He has also had numerous journal articles and reports published on issues of racism, the far-right, hate crime, policing, cultural criminology, and identity. He is on the Editorial Board of Ethnic and Racial Studies. He is a Trustee of Stop Hate UK, on the Board of the International Network for Hate Studies and on the Steering Committee of the British Society of Criminology Hate Crime Network.

Kiernan Gordon

Assistant Professor of Sport and Recreation Management, Department of Business, University of New England

Phone: 207.602.2605 · E-Mail: kgordon6@une.edu

Dr. Kiernan Gordon is Assistant Professor of Sport and Recreation Management within the Department of Business at the University of New England. His research examines the role that emotion plays in sport spectators' consumption of sport venues and related products. This focus includes a strong emphasis on the influence of security protocol and related technologies on the sport consumer experience, as well as emphases on sport venue design, fan behavior, and heritage sport tourism. He has presented at numerous international and national conferences, including the annual meetings for the North American Society for Sport Management, the North American Society for the Sociology of Sport, the Society for the Study of Symbolic Interactionism, and the American Sociological Association.

Dr. Gordon has held faculty appointments at Miami University (Ohio) and the University of New Hampshire and has published in a variety of peer-reviewed journals. In addition to serving NCS⁴ as a Research Fellow, he has served as a guest speaker at a variety of institutions, including Harvard University's Graduate School of Design.

A long-time, former men's college basketball coach, Dr. Gordon holds a Ph.D. from The Ohio State University with a dual emphasis in sociocultural aspects of sport and sport management, an M.S. from High Point University in sport studies with a dual concentration in sport management and exercise science, and a B.A. from the University of California, Santa Cruz in interpersonal processes of interaction, an independent major comprised of sociology, linguistics, and behavioral neuroscience coursework.

Laura Gulledge

Assistant Professor, School of Criminal Justice, The University of Southern Mississippi

Phone: 601.266.4509 · E-Mail: Laura.Gulledge@usm.edu

Laura Gulledge is an Assistant Professor in the School of Criminal Justice at The University of Southern Mississippi. She earned her Bachelor of Arts in Criminology from the University of Florida. She also holds a Master of Arts and PhD. in Criminology from the University of South Florida. Her research interests include school crime and victimization, including security pertaining to youth sporting events. Other research interests include intervention strategies for juvenile offenders in diversion programs, co-occurring disorders in juvenile populations, and psychosocial risk factors associated with delinquency. Dr. Gulledge's research has appeared in various journals including Criminal Justice & Behavior, Deviant Behavior, Journal of Crime and Justice, Criminal Justice Policy Review, Journal of Child and Adolescent Substance Abuse, & Journal of Emotional and Behavioral Disorders. She frequently presents at the annual meetings of the American Society of Criminology as well as the Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences. Dr. Gulledge teaches the juvenile law module to police recruits at the Southern Regional Public Safety Institute at Camp Shelby. Currently, she is teaching courses at USM on juvenile justice, juvenile corrections, and juvenile law. Last year, she was nominated for the College of Science and Technology Outstanding Faculty Teaching Award.

Stacey A. Hall

NCS⁴ Director and Professor of Sport Management, College of Business and Economic Development, The University of Southern Mississippi

Phone: 601.266.6308 · E-Mail: Stacey.A.Hall@usm.edu

Dr. Hall played an integral role in the creation of the National Center for Spectator Sports Safety and Security and served as the Associate Director from 2006-2014. She continued to serve the institution through various leadership roles, including Interim Associate Dean of the College of Health, Chair of the Department of Economic Development, Tourism, and Sport Management, and most recently as Executive Associate Dean for the College of Business and Economic Development.

Dr. Hall's expertise is in the area of sport safety and security management. She has published in leading international sport management, homeland security, and emergency management journals and has co-authored two textbooks--Sport Facility Operations Management and Security Management for Sports and Special Events. Additionally, she has been invited to publish in national magazines such as Athletic Management, Athletic Administration, and Security Magazine. Dr. Hall has been referred to as one of the nation's leading experts in sport security with interviews in USA Today, ESPN the Magazine, CBS New York, and also appeared on a live national broadcast of ESPN's Outside the Lines. Dr. Hall was one of 150 experts from across the globe invited to attend the first International Sport Security Conference in Doha, Qatar. Dr. Hall has presented at international and national conferences, and conducted invited presentations for U.S. federal and state agencies, college athletic conferences, and professional sport leagues, including Major League Soccer (MLS).

Dr. Hall has been the principal investigator on external grant awards in excess of $4M. Funded projects included awards from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to develop risk management curriculum for sport security personnel at NCAA institutions, conduct risk assessments at college sport stadia, and develop training programs for sport venue staff. Dr. Hall has also been involved in several service projects including the development of a risk assessment tool for U.S. sport stadia in conjunction with the Department of Homeland Security and International Association of Venue Managers; development of a disaster mitigation plan post-Katrina for the Mississippi Regional Housing Authority; and development of a sport safety and security system for a K-12 school district in Houston, TX.

Dr. Hall teaches undergraduate and graduate sport management courses in economics, finance, and security. She developed a graduate level emphasis area in sport security management for the Master's program at Southern Miss. Dr. Hall has completed threat/risk assessment training through the National Emergency Response and Rescue Training Center; terrorist bombing training through New Mexico Tech Energetic Materials and Testing Center; and special events contingency planning for public safety agencies training through the FEMA Emergency Management Institute.

Dr. Hall played soccer at Southern Miss from 1997-2001 and holds the record for most goals scored. She was inducted into the Southern Miss Sports Hall of Fame in 2013. She also captained the Northern Ireland International Soccer Team until her retirement in 2008.

Joshua Hill

Assistant Professor, School of Criminal Justice, The University of Southern Mississippi

Phone: 601.266.4509 · E-Mail: Joshua.B.Hill@usm.edu

Joshua B. Hill is an Assistant Professor of Criminal Justice at The University of Southern Mississippi and a Fellow at the Office of Global Perspectives and Metropolitan Center at the University of Central Florida. His research areas focus on homeland security and terrorism, with a particular interest in terrorist targeting and event-based analysis. Dr. Hill previously worked for the Institute for the Study of Violent Groups as a lead analyst where he was in charge of the research arm of the Institute. In addition to his current faculty role at The University of Southern Mississippi, Dr. Hill serves as the Master's Coordinator for the School of Criminal Justice. He holds a Bachelors of Arts in International Relations, a Master's of Arts Degree in Criminal Justice and Criminology from Sam Houston State University, and a PhD in Criminal Justice, also from Sam Houston State University. He is the co-author of Homeland Security in America with Nancy Marion and Will Oliver, and Introduction to Cybercrime, as well as numerous journal articles and book chapters.

Brad Humphreys

Professor of Economics, West Virginia University

Phone: 304.293.7871 · E-Mail: brhumphreys@mail.wvu.edu

Brad R. Humphreys is professor of economics in the Department of Economics, John T. Chambers College of Business and Economics at West Virginia University. He received his PhD in economics from the Johns Hopkins University. He previously held faculty positions at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the University of Alberta. His research on the economics and financing of professional sports, including crime and sports, and the economics of gambling has been published in academic journals in economics and policy analysis, including the Journal of Urban Economics, the Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, the Journal of Regional Science, the Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, and Regional Science and Urban Economics. He has published more than 100 papers in peer-reviewed journals in economics and public policy. He is Editor-in-Chief of Contemporary Economic Policy, a general interest economics journal and serves on the editorial boards of the Journal of Sports Economics, the International Journal of Sport Finance, the International Journal of Sport Management and Marketing, and International Gambling Studies. He became Benedum Distinguished Scholar in Behavioral and Social Sciences at West Virginia University in 2017. In March 2019 he was elected as Vice President of the Eastern Economic Association and will serve as President in 2022.

Justin Kurland

Director of Research, NCS⁴ / Research Professor, The University of Southern Mississippi

Phone: 601.266.5022 · E-Mail: Justin.Kurland@usm.edu

Dr. Justin Kurland is the Director of Research at The University of Southern Mississippi's National Center for Spectator Sports Safety and Security. He is currently responsible for the NCS⁴'s research and evaluation, which includes the development of venue- and spectator-specific surveys, the spatiotemporal analysis of current and emerging safety and security problems as well as operational research and evaluation of technologies meant to help reduce and prevent potential harm. Dr. Kurland also oversees NCS⁴'s research fellows who provide expertise and generate peer-reviewed journal articles and conference papers on various aspects of sport safety and security from across the world.

Prior to his current position at NCS⁴, Dr. Kurland was a Senior Lecturer (US equivalent of Associate Professor) for the Institute of Security and Crime Science at the University of Waikato (New Zealand). There he taught several foundational graduate level courses on security, crime science, and prevention, in addition to serving as a principal investigator on numerous security related grants. Before taking his position as a Senior Lecturer, Dr. Kurland was a Postdoctoral Fellow at Rutgers University's School of Criminal Justice, where he conducted research with Stockholm Prize Winner (Criminology's Nobel Prize) and the Associate Director of the Center for Problem-Oriented Policing, Professor Ronald V. Clarke, focusing primarily on aspects of spatiotemporal crime pattern analysis and situational prevention.

Dr. Kurland has a Ph.D. in Security and Crime Science from the Faculty of Engineering Sciences, University College London. His dissertation entitled "The Ecology of Football-Related Crime and Disorder" explored how ecological changes in the area around stadia when they were used for soccer games as opposed to days in which these facilities were not used facilitated different opportunities and risk. This was achieved through the analysis of various datasets, including, but not limited to police-recorded crime data, attendance figures from games, and numerous aspects of the physical and social landscape around these stadia such as the street network and constellation of facilities such as pubs that are routinely visited during game days. Dr. Kurland received a studentship (US equivalent to a full scholarship plus a living stipend) from related research he conducted for the Government Office for London (GoL), the Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO), the UK Football Policing Unit (UKFPU), and the Scottish Government to fully fund his doctoral studies. He also holds a Master's degree in Criminal Justice from Boston University and a Bachelor's degree in Psychology from Rutgers University.

Brian E. Menaker

Associate Professor and Sport Business Program Coordinator, Department of Health and Kinesiology, Texas A&M University – Kingsville

Phone: 361.593.4437 · E-Mail: brian.menaker@tamuk.edu

Dr. Brian Menaker is an Associate Professor and Coordinator of the Sport Business Program at Texas A&M University- Kingsville and a fellow at The University of Southern Mississippi’s National Center for Spectator Sports Safety and Security. His research interests include the impact of public policy on sport. His primary focus considers the intersection of spectator sport events and venues with public health and safety. This focus has supported a primary line related to sport venue and event law enforcement, public safety, and security planning. Additional interests include the impact of sporting events on crime and disorder in cities. He has presented his research at international conferences including the World Association of Sport Management, Sport Management Association of Australia and New Zealand, Sport Recreation and Law Association, North American Society for Sport Management, American Society of Criminology, and American Public Health Association. Published manuscripts have appeared in peer-reviewed journals including the Journal of Sport Safety and Security, VOLUNTAS: International Journal of Voluntary and Nonprofit Organizations. He also serves on the editorial board for the Journal of Issues in Intercollegiate Athletics.

Dr. Menaker holds a BA in History from Grinnell College, an MA in Sport Studies from the University of Iowa, and a PhD in Health and Human Performance with a concentration in Sport Management from the University of Florida. Prior to his career in academia, Dr. Menaker previously coached cross country and track and field at the intercollegiate level and worked in sport event and facility management at the University of Iowa. He serves as an organizer of the Kingsville Walking and Running Programs which offer free, safe, and organized walking and running events to encourage physical activity participation in the Coastal Bend region of Texas.

Panos Patros

Lecturer, Department of Computer Science, University of Waikato

Phone: +64 7838.4651 · E-Mail: panos.patros@waikato.ac.nz

Dr. Panos Patros is interested in various aspects of Software Engineering but in particular, Self-Adaptation in Clouds, Language Runtimes and Embedded Systems, focusing on the Testing and Satisfaction of Nonfunctional Requirements as well as Systems' Security. He joined the Department of Computer Science of the University of Waikato in July 2018 as a Lecturer; soon after, he started the Oceania Researchers in Cloud and Adaptive-systems (ORCA) lab. Additionally, he is serving as an Adjunct Professor in the Faculty of Computer Science at the University of New Brunswick in Canada.

Dr. Patros received his Bachelors in Informatics and Telecommunications from the University of Athens in 2010. He worked for four years as a Software Engineer, Consultant and Academic Tutor before moving to Canada and the University of New Brunswick for graduate school. He completed his Master's in Computer Science in 2014 and his PhD in 2018, both as a member of the IBM/UNB Centre of Advanced Studies - Atlantic. While in Canada, he taught CS courses (after completing a Diploma in University Teaching in 2014) and participated in industrial R&D projects.

For his BSc thesis, Panos constructed a converter of Conjunctive Grammars (Context-Free plus Intersection) to their respective automata and vice-versa. For his master's thesis, he enhanced the IBM J9 JVM with a tool that measured thread-park contention in the Java Util Concurrent library. For his PhD thesis, he explored numerous performance, modelling and resource allocation issues in the intersection of platform clouds and language runtimes, in a work that also resulted into two patents and four defensive anti-patent disclosures. He is also a member of the Verilog-To-Routing FPGA CAD tool open source community, where he contributes and conducts research related to improved synthesis of circuits for embedded systems.

Hyunwoong Pyun

Postdoctoral Associate, Department of Sport Management and Economics, Ruhr University

Phone: +49 0234.23870 · E-Mail: hyunwoong.pyun@ruhr-uni-bochum.de

Dr. Hyunwoong Pyun is a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Sport Management and Economics at Ruhr University Bochum, Germany and a research fellow at the National Center for Spectator Sports Safety and Security at The University of Southern Mississippi. His research interests include sports and health related urban policy evaluation. Dr. Pyun applies various modern empirical strategies based on econometric techniques that fall under the general classification of "causal inference" methods to deal with issues of endogeneity and drive the causal relationship. For example, the relationship between sporting events and crime. He has published several peer-review articles on aspects of sports safety and security in the Journal of Regional Science, Empirical Economics, and Applied Economics.

Dr. Pyun holds B.S.S. and M.S.S. degree in physical education from Seoul National University, Korea, and M.A. in economics from the University of Alberta, Canada. He received his PhD in economics from West Virginia University. He also serves as a member of the Competence Field Metropolitan Research in the University Alliance Ruhr, Germany, and actively participates in various research projects within the group.

Alina Ristea

Postdoctoral Research Associate, School of Public Policy and Urban Affairs, Northeastern University

a.ristea@northeastern.edu

Dr. Alina Ristea is Postdoctoral Research Associate for the Boston Area Research Initiative (BARI), part of the School of Public Policy and Urban Affairs at Northeastern University. She is currently involved in various research projects regarding urban science – understanding cities. Her interests include, but are not limited to, spatial crime analysis, sporting events and crime occurrences, social media mining, predictive analytics, safety perception, neighborhood analysis, GIScience, and urban informatics.

Dr. Ristea received her PhD from the Department of Geoinformatics Z_GIS from the University of Salzburg (Austria). Her dissertation entitled the "Integration and Evaluation of Social Media in Crime Prediction Models" focused on geospatial predictive crime analysis through an exploration of the complex parameters of social media data and additional sociodemographic status as well as safety risk factors. The overall goal of this work was to identify significant social media information and how to best operationalize it in spatial and spatiotemporal crime prediction models. A narrower focus of this research related more specifically to crowd-based events, thus facilitating the exploration of three core elements: crime, social media and sporting events. The main thrust of which was on forecasting both the place and time that crime happens at these events, along with what specific type of crime might occur.

Prior to her PhD studies, Dr. Ristea received her Bachelor's from the University of Bucharest (Romania) in Geography and Cartography. After her Bachelor's, she did a two year Masters in GIS (Geographic Information Systems), also at the University of Bucharest. Following her graduate work Dr. Ristea worked for two years on a research team at the National Meteorological Administration in Bucharest, focusing on the GIS and remote sensing side of numerous research projects.

Brian Schaefer

Assistant Professor, Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice, Indiana University - Southeast

Phone: 812.941.2890 · E-Mail: bpschaef@iu.edu

Brian P. Schaefer is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice and teaches in the criminology and criminal justice, cybercriminology and security studies, and intelligence analysis degree programs. His research interests focus on policing, particularly police culture, police investigations, police violence and violence towards the police, police technologies, and police training. Current projects include an evaluation of a police department's adoption of body-worn cameras and the examination of how misdemeanor offenses effect local criminal justice systems. He is a member of the Research Network for Misdemeanor Justice at John Jay College and a Commonwealth Scholar at the Commonwealth Institute of Kentucky at the University of Louisville. He has published numerous technical reports, book chapters, and articles published in journals such as Theoretical Criminology, Deviant Behavior, and British Journal of Criminology. He is also co-author of The Police and Society (4th Edition). He holds a Bachelors of Arts in Sociology from McKendree University, a Master's of Science Degree in Criminal Justice from Eastern Kentucky University, and a Ph.D. in Justice Administration from the University of Louisville.

Derya Tekin

Assistant Professor, Department of Criminal Law and Criminal Procedure Law, Istanbul Medeniyet University

Phone: +90 216.280.4084 · E-Mail: derya.tekin@medeniyet.edu.tr

Derya Tekin is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Criminal Law and Criminal Procedure Law, at İstanbul Medeniyet University, School of Law. She earned her Bachelor of Laws from Ankara University, Turkey. She holds a Master of Laws in International Criminal Law from the University of Sussex, UK. Dr. Tekin received a PhD in Law from Queen's University Belfast, UK. Her thesis entitled "An Evaluation of Situational Crime Prevention in Football in Turkey" examined fans' perceptions of situational crime prevention techniques in the Turkish soccer context. Within the scope of her PhD, sponsored by the Turkish government, Tekin undertook fieldwork with the representatives of the fan Fenerbahçe soccer team fan groups in 2015 in İstanbul, Turkey. Her research interests focus on sport security, criminal law, medical criminal law, criminology, crime prevention, criminal reconciliation, and qualitative evaluation.

Joslyn Zale

Research Associate and CSSP Manager, NCS⁴, and Adjunct Geography Faculty, School of Biological, Environmental, and Earth Sciences, The University of Southern Mississippi

Phone: 601.266.6867 · E-Mail: joslyn.zale@usm.edu

Dr. Zale is a research associate with NCS⁴ and an adjunct faculty member with the USM's Department of Geography and Geology. Her research interests include modeling risk, vulnerability, and resilience to hazard events, evacuation modeling, social media use related to hazard events, geospatial big data sources and uses, multi-scale and spatio-temporal modeling, citizen science, and location privacy.

Her research has appeared in numerous publications, including The Professional Geographer, the Journal of Emergency Management, and Southeastern Geographer. She has presented her work at national and international conferences and before U.S. Congressional delegations.

Dr. Zale has collaborated on more than $22 million of research funded by DHS, NSF, Department of Education, and the Mississippi Office of Homeland Security, and is a reviewer for the Journal of Emergency Management. She received her PhD in geography from USM.

Yuanyuan Zhang

Associate Professor and Research Professor, School of Construction and Design, The University of Southern Mississippi

Phone: 601.266.5514 · E-Mail: yuanyuan.zhang@usm.edu

Dr. Yuanyuan Zhang is an Assistant Professor at the School of Construction and Design at The University of Southern Mississippi (USM). Dr. Zhang is also a Research Professor at the School of Construction and Design at USM.

Dr. Zhang received her Ph.D. degree in Transportation Planning and Management from Tongji University in 2012 and was funded as an exchange Ph.D. student at University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley) for two years. After her graduation, she subsequently worked at UC Berkeley as a Post-Doctoral Researcher. In 2016, she joined The University of Southern Mississippi (USM) and lives in Hattiesburg, Mississippi.

Dr. Zhang has extensive research experience in various areas of transportation engineering, planning, and management, including transportation safety, network analysis, and crowd pedestrian studies. Her current research interests include: transportation safety, system resiliency, transportation related economic development, and machine learning applications in planning and design. Her current research project on uses deep learning to automatically collect pedestrian facility data and is funded by the Federal Highway Administration through National Academy of Sciences. This project marks the first time this grant comes to the state of Mississippi in its 20-year history. Dr. Zhang also teaches several undergraduate courses at the University, including AEC 390 Engineering Economy and AEC 270 Statics and Strengths of Materials.