The Research and Evaluation Center at John Jay College selected three doctoral students in criminal justice to receive the 2019 Jack Rudin and Lewis Rudin Research Fellowship. Rudin Research Fellowships were supported with funding from the May and Samuel Rudin Family Foundation, Inc. and designed to allow graduate student researchers from the City University of New York to participate as members of the research team at the Research and Evaluation Center. Rudin Fellows worked on a variety of projects but with a special focus on research that improves the effectiveness of the justice system in New York City.

2019 Rudin Research Fellows

Diba Rouzbahani, Rudin Research Fellow, is a Ph.D. student in Criminal Justice at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York/ John Jay College of Criminal Justice. Her research focuses on sentencing practices and the relationship between punishment and inequality. Previously, she served as CUNY Summer Fellow at the Vera Institute of Justice working on analyzing and visualizing jail expansion. Diba graduated with a B.A in law from Allameh Tabataba’i University in Tehran and holds a masters in criminal justice from Rutgers University.

Lidia Vásquez, Rudin Research Fellow, is a Ph.D. Student in Criminal Justice at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York/ John Jay College of Criminal Justice. Previously, she worked on impact evaluations of governmental programs, labor market dynamics and women’s economic empowerment at La Fundación Salvadoreña para el Desarrollo Económico y Social (FUSADES) and before that on transparency and anti-corruption for the United Nations Development Program. Lidia graduated with a B.A. in business and economics and a diploma in quantitative methods from Escuela Superior de Economía y Negocios (ESEN), La Libertad, El Salvador.

Yuchen Hou, Rudin Research Fellow, is a Ph.D. candidate in Criminal Justice at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York/ John Jay College of Criminal Justice. His research interests include police use of force, police use of body-worn cameras, and multi/mixed-methods research designs. Hou, in his doctoral dissertation, aims to identify multilevel factors that may differentially contribute to the opportunities for fatal and non-fatal police shootings in the United States, by building a crowdsourced national database on police shootings. Hou earned a masters in procedural law at People’s Public Security University of China, after graduating with a bachelor of laws in criminal investigation from Criminal Investigation Police University of China.