Dr. Jennifer Wood
The School of Economic, Political and Policy Sciences (EPPS) will launch a new interdisciplinary speaker series this month with a talk by Dr. Jennifer Wood, an associate professor in the Department of Criminal Justice at Temple University.
Dr. Denis Dean, dean of EPPS, said the school’s six administrative programs already have speaker series, but he wanted to create a new event to highlight research that spans two or more disciplines.
“Real-world problems rarely fit between neat, disciplinary lines. Such problems can only be addressed by bringing together the strengths of multiple disciplines,” Dean said. “The Irving J. Hoch Interdisciplinary Speaker Series will highlight the disciplinary growth and real-world problem-solving that interdisciplinary research can produce.”
The series’ inaugural lecture, titled “Spatial Autocorrelation and Qualitative Sampling: Conceptualization, an Application and Extensions,” is open to the public and begins at 1 p.m. Nov. 8 in the Naveen Jindal School of Management 1.107.
About Dr. Jennifer Wood
Title: Associate professor in the Department of Criminal Justice at Temple University
Education: Bachelor's degree in criminology at the University of Ottawa (1994), master's (1995) and PhD (2000) in criminology from the University of Toronto
Previously: Fellow for the Regulatory Institutions Network (RegNet) at the Australian National University
Expertise: Policing, regulation
An expert in policing and regulation, Wood often combines the fields of geographic information sciences (GIS) and criminology in her research. She currently leads a research project in Philadelphia designed to strengthen connections between policing, security and public health entities.
UT Dallas’ Dr. Daniel Griffith, Ashbel Smith professor of GIS, and Timothy Brown, master’s student in the GIS program, are collaborators with Wood and are working on a project that focuses on perceptions of local government interventions to control the spread of West Nile virus in Dallas County.
Dean said he aims to have two interdisciplinary lectures per semester, beginning in the spring.
Dr. John Worrall, department head of criminology, said faculty and students benefit from interacting with well-known researchers from beyond the University. Guest presenters bring new perspectives and ideas to the program, as well as opportunities for collaboration, he said.
"EPPS is a multidisciplinary college,” Worrall said, “so it is only fitting that experts whose research is of interest to multiple programs be invited to come share what's hot in their fields of study."
The series is named for the longtime economics professor, “Irv” Hoch, who died in May.