Eileen Chen is a PhD student in the Criminal Justice department. Before starting the PhD program, she worked full-time as a Community Support Specialist for Philadelphia’s Office of Public Safety, conducting neighborhood outreach on the ground pertaining to the 9th and 22nd police districts. She holds a Bachelor’s degree in Criminal Justice and Psychology from George Washington University, with a minor in Spanish. In her undergraduate career, she was a research assistant in the Diverse Family Relations lab and tutored in a juvenile detention facility.
In graduate school, she seeks to examine the community impacts of the intermediary effects of gentrifying development—construction, roadblocks, service cutoffs, pollution, light pollution—on a community's social disorganization and ability to hold collective efficacy in response to their youth violence. Her interests lie in spatial inequality, urban neighborhoods, gentrification, race, families, youth violence prevention, social service provision, and ethnography. She seeks to explore such topics through qualitative methods based in block-by-block field notes and interviews.