About Us

Dr. Joel Capellan is an Associate Professor of Criminal Justice at John Jay College and the Director of  the Center for Enhancing the Research Capacity of Minority Serving Institutions (CERC-MSI). He earned his Ph.D. in Criminal Justice from the CUNY Graduate Center/John Jay College in 2016. Dr. Capellan’s research focuses on gun violence, the intersection of race and policing, and policy evaluation. He has authored over three dozen articles on these topics, and his work has been featured in national media outlets such as The Guardian, NPR, New York Magazine, Univision, and ABC News.

Joshua D. Freilich is a professor in the Criminal Justice Department at John Jay College. His research has been funded by DHS and NIJ and focuses on the causes of and responses to targeted violence, open-source research methods, and criminology theory, especially situational crime prevention.

Justice Evans is a 5th-year Ph.D. student in the Criminal Justice department at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City. She holds a B.S. and M.A. in Criminal Justice from Old Dominion University and John Jay College of Criminal Justice, respectively. Justice’s research interests include police surveillance technologies, program evaluation, data visualization, and causal methods. She has experience as a court advocate and more recently completed an Applied Justice research fellowship with the Reshaping Prosecution initiative at the Vera Institute of Justice and the Research and Evaluation Center at John Jay.

Noreen Ali is a fourth-year doctoral student at the CUNY Graduate Center and a graduate assistant at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. She holds a B.S. in Criminal Justice from Pace University and an M.A. in Criminal Justice from Fairleigh Dickinson University. Currently, she teaches undergraduate and graduate courses at John Jay College of Criminal Justice and Fairleigh Dickinson University. In addition, she has worked as a research assistant on multiple projects focused on sexual abuse, criminal stigma, terrorism, voter suppression, abortion, and dark web sexploitation. Her current work centers on the prevalence of sexual abuse in youth-serving organizations and examines how childhood sexual abuse impacts survivors’ reporting behaviors and personal outcomes.

Davia Willis is a Dual BS/MA student at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. She works as a research assistant and first got hands-on experience through the CUNY Research Scholars Program, where she spent a year working on a project with a faculty mentor. She has also completed Honors Contract research papers that allowed me to go beyond the regular curriculum and explore topics through independent data collection and analysis. She is especially interested in research connected to current affairs and in the fields of psychology, criminal justice, and sociology. Being an international student from Jamaica has shaped the way she sees the world, and she tries to bring that perspective into both her studies and research.