Jason Gravel joined the faculty in the Department of Criminal Justice at Temple University in 2020. Before joining the Temple faculty, Dr. Gravel was a postdoctoral fellow at the Penn Injury Science Center in the Department of Biostatistics, Epidemiology, and Informatics at the University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine. His dissertation work focused on the use of police records to conduct social network analysis, and he completed his Ph.D. in Criminology, Law, and Society at the University of California, Irvine, in 2018. While at UCI, Dr. Gravel was a fellow of the Data Science Initiative through which he received extensive training in data science for the management, analysis, and visualization of large and complex data.

Dr. Gravel’s research focuses on the application of social network analysis in many areas of criminology and criminal justice research, most notably in the study of street gangs, co-offending, gun violence, and police misconduct. Dr. Gravel is also an expert in the analysis of the effectiveness of criminal justice policies, particularly in the areas of firearm laws and gang violence prevention and intervention. His work on these topics has been published in the Journal of Quantitative Criminology, Criminology & Public Policy, Justice Quarterly, and Injury Prevention.

He is currently a co-investigator on a grant from the National Consortium for Gun Violence Research studying state-level and county-level variability in firearm-related deaths and the impact of changes in gun policies. He is also involved in a longitudinal study of the structure of social networks in police departments and their influence on attitudes, misconduct, and staff retention.