Dr. Alex Piquero: What Makes A Criminal?

Alex R. Piquero is Professor in the Department of Sociology & Criminology and Arts & Sciences Distinguished Scholar the University of Miami and previously served as the Director of the Bureau of Justice Statistics, one of the nation’s thirteen federal statistical agencies (appointed by President Biden, June 2022). Dr. Piquero is a nationally and internationally recognized criminologist with more than 26 years of experience. Over the course of his career, Dr. Piquero has given congressional testimony on evidence-based crime prevention practices and has provided counsel and support to several local, state, national and international criminal justice agencies and elected leaders. His expertise ranges from criminal careers to criminal justice policy and crime prevention to the intersection of race/ethnicity and crime, with a focus on quantitative methodology. Dr. Piquero has published over 500 scholarly articles and several books and is among the most highly cited criminologists in the world. He also served as editor of the Journal of Quantitative Criminology and the Justice Evaluation Journal. He is a Fellow of both the American Society of Criminology and the Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences. In 2019, he received the Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences Bruce Smith Sr. Award for outstanding contributions to criminal justice, and in 2020, he received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Division of Developmental and Life-Course Criminology of the American Society of Criminology.