Dr. Alejandro Gimenez-Santana has an M.Sc. and a Ph.D. in Global Affairs from Rutgers University. He is an Assistant Professor of Professional Practice in the School of Criminal Justice at Rutgers University, where he serves as Director of the Newark Public Safety Collaborative (NPSC). Before assuming the position of NPSC Director, he served as a consultant for the World Bank in Colombia, and the Inter-American Development Bank in Uruguay. Dr. Santana is the Director of the Rutgers-Newark anchor initiative “Newark Public Safety Collaborative,” for which he has secured over $4.5M in external funding since 2018. He teaches graduate and undergraduate courses on crime mapping and comparative criminal justice systems across different cultures. His research foci are spatial analytics, social disorganization, communities, and neighborhood effects on crime. Dr. Santana has extensively researched the association between unique contexts of social disorganization and the effect of the built environment on the spatial distribution of violence and crime across urban settings. He has over ten years of experience in the criminal justice field and has been invited to present at research and practitioner conferences in over a dozen countries across Europe, Latin America, and North America. Dr. Santana’s contribution to the study of community responses to crime problems via the data-informed community engagement (DICE) model has been featured in national and international press outlets and, most recently, by the U.S. Department of Justice.
