Faculty Fellow

Dr. Elizabeth Adams is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Criminal Justice at Temple University. Her research examines the experiences of justice-involved women, with a focus on trauma, parenting, and family reunification during community supervision. She is particularly interested in how relational and emotional processes shape desistance and long-term wellbeing.

During her Public Policy Lab Fellowship, Dr. Adams is expanding her research program by examining the role of therapeutic arts as a community-based intervention for justice-involved individuals and families. Her current project, Healing Through Art in Philadelphia, investigates how art therapy and creative practices are being used across the city, particularly with at-risk and justice-involved populations. Drawing on a Liberal Arts Undergraduate Research Award and collaborative work with undergraduate researcher Myasia Nunez, the project involves mapping local programs, conducting practitioner interviews, and identifying best practices in community-based therapeutic arts.

In parallel, Dr. Adams recently completed graduate coursework in Temple’s Art Therapy program and is developing a community-based ceramics studio in South Philadelphia, which will serve as a site for pilot programming focused on therapeutic arts approaches with justice-involved women. Through this interdisciplinary work, she integrates feminist criminological theory, trauma-informed practice, and arts-based approaches to support emotional regulation, maternal and personal identity reconstruction, and family reunification.

Project Description

As part of the Public Policy Lab Fellowship, Dr. Adams is leading a community-engaged research project titled Healing Through Art in Philadelphia. This project seeks to better understand how therapeutic arts programs are currently operating across the city and how they may support justice-involved individuals, particularly women navigating reentry and family reunification.

The project uses a mixed-methods design that includes program mapping, practitioner interviews, and exploratory data collection from local art therapy and healing arts programs. The research focuses on identifying the populations served, therapeutic approaches used, and the ways programs are embedded within community networks.

Findings from this mapping phase will inform the development of pilot therapeutic arts programming at a newly established ceramics studio space in South Philadelphia. These preliminary interventions will focus on justice-involved mothers and their children, with particular attention to emotional regulation, maternal well-being, and parent-child relationship development.

By bridging feminist criminology, trauma-informed care, and therapeutic arts approaches, this project aims to expand current understandings of community-based interventions and provide a foundation for future research and policy recommendations that move beyond traditional correctional approaches toward more holistic, relational models of support.

Graduate Fellow

Taiwo J. Adeagbo is a PhD candidate in the Department of Political Science at Temple University. His research sits at the intersection of comparative politics and political economy of development, with a special interest in party-focused democracy assistance and institutional development in sub-Saharan Africa.

Project Description

Since the end of the Cold War, democracy assistance has become a central tool through which external actors seek to promote reform in developing countries. Yet, despite sustained efforts in party-building, electoral processes, and governance programs, its effects on political institutions remain highly uneven. Existing explanations tend to focus either on donor strategies or domestic institutional constraints, offering limited insights into why similar interventions produce divergent outcomes across countries.

Taiwo’s research examines how democracy assistance shapes party organizational development, with particular attention to the role of political elites. His project advances a conditional theory arguing that the effectiveness of party-focused democracy assistance depends on whether elite incentives align with long-term investment in party organization. Through a mixed-method approach, the study combines time-series cross-national data on African multiparty systems (2000 to 2025) with comparative case studies of Ghana and Nigeria, alongside a shadow case of Kenya, to trace how elites respond to externally supported reforms.

This research speaks directly to ongoing policy debates about the effectiveness of democracy assistance. By identifying the conditions under which external support strengthens—or fails to strengthen—party organizations, the project offers practical insights for donors, development agencies, and international organizations.

Faculty Fellow

Dr. Maia Cucchiara is Associate Professor of Urban Education at Temple University. She applies a sociological lens to questions of urban education, with a particular focus on people’s lived experiences with education policy in the urban context.

Research Team Fellow

Dr. Donald Hantula is Associate Professor in the Department of Psychology and Neuroscience at Temple University. His research focuses on interactions between human and non-human agents in organizational contexts.

Faculty Fellow

Dr. Chelsea Helion is Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychology and Neuroscience at Temple University. Her research uses both behavioral and neuroimaging methods to examine emotion, memory, and decision-making in adult and developmental populations.

Research Team Fellow

Yunming Jia is a PhD student from China in the Department of Criminal Justice at Temple University. Her research focuses on juvenile delinquency, victimization, life-course criminology, and narrative identity.

Project Description 

Yunming’s dissertation study examines the core assumption of narrative criminology that internalized self-narratives play a central role in behavioral change and desistance from crime. Although qualitative studies have provided important insights into how narrative transformations accompany desistance, relatively few studies have examined these processes using longitudinal quantitative data. This project addresses this gap by examining how narrative constructs and offending behaviors influence one another over time among serious juvenile offenders using data from the Pathways to Desistance study. Specifically, the study focuses on four core dimensions (i.e., self-concept, agency, future orientation, and moral perceptions) derived from Maruna’s (2001) concept of the redemption script and assesses both their longitudinal relationships with offending and the extent to which these relationships vary across racial groups. Together, these narrative constructs capture central aspects of how individuals understand who they are, assess their capacity for change, envision future possibilities, and interpret the moral meaning of their actions. By integrating narrative criminology with advanced longitudinal modeling, this research offers a novel framework for operationalizing desistance narratives and provides new insight into the mechanisms linking identity transformation and behavioral change.

Research Team Fellow

Abigail Lee is a PhD student in the Department of Psychology and Neuroscience at Temple University. She holds a JD from Stetson University College of Law where she focused on human rights and international law. She spent over a decade as a regulatory compliance attorney for the financial services industry and proudly served as general counsel for a large national corporation where she led various DEI initiatives and worked closely with other executives to promote a supportive, psychologically safe work culture. Ms. Lee is an autistic researcher dedicated to finding ways to increase employment and leadership opportunities for autistic workers.

Project Description

Abigail's research focuses on assessing how autistic people are impacted by the use of AI in hiring processes, including creating job ads, writing job descriptions, screening applicants, and conducting interviews. She is particularly interested in how AI systems encode implicit bias against autistic people, how these biases may reflect longstanding medicalized views of autism, and how such systems can be redesigned to support more equitable and objective hiring practices.

Research Team Fellow Fellow

Jackson Lied a PhD candidate in the Department of Political Science at Temple University. His research examines the global governance of maritime security. Particularly, he is investigating how those international organizations and pieces of international law which govern piracy, terrorism, and naval warfare, among other phenomena, have evolved from the mid-nineteenth century to the present day.

Project Description

The world depends on safe and open seas for trade, food supplies, energy, and global security. Yet maritime threats—from piracy and smuggling to territorial conflict and illegal fishing—are growing more complex. This project examines how international organizations and treaties work together to govern security at sea. Drawing on archival research, interviews, and case studies, Jackson Lied examines the changing network of treaties and organizations that govern maritime security from 1919 to 2027. The study explores why major crises often lead to new institutions and whether more coordinated systems produce better results. It also looks at current flashpoints, including the South China Sea, the war in Ukraine, Houthi attacks on shipping, and Somali piracy. The project will help explain how global institutions can respond to emerging threats and why effective governance of the seas matters for trade, security, and international stability.

Graduate Fellow

Hippolyte Milet-Likhachev is a PhD candidate in the Department of Political Science at Temple University. He is conducting research at the intersection of international security and international political economy. He is broadly interested in how governments strategically use economic tools to pursue security goals. His current projects include a dissertation on industrial policy in the United States and the European Union and a co-authored paper on the changing dynamics of the transatlantic alliance.

Project Description

Hippolyte investigates why strategic industrial policy (i.e., government initiatives aimed at shaping industries to enhance national security and economic competitiveness) varies across and within liberal democracies, despite facing similar geopolitical and technological challenges. Focusing on the United States and the European Union, Hippolyte introduces the concept of "high-tech bricolage" to describe adaptive policymaking processes shaped by institutional legacies, geopolitical pressures, and policy diffusion. Drawing on Lévi-Strauss’s distinction between engineers and bricoleurs, he conceptualizes industrial policy as the product of partial coordination and reactive experimentation rather than pure centralized design.

Faculty Fellow

Dr. Lauren Olsen is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at Temple University. Her research focuses on inequalities in higher education and medical education in the United States.

Project Description

Dr. Olsen is working on a project tentatively titled “Unequal Attrition Along the Premedical Path: A Longitudinal Study of U.S. Premed Students.” In it, she examines why lower income, first-generation, and underrepresented minority students would be more likely to leave the premedical path than their higher income, continuing generation, and white and Asian peers. Her interview- and survey-based research is oriented around further understanding and illustrating what a supportive climate and faculty would look like to students, regardless of background, and how their experiences might vary. With regard to policy, in this project Dr. Olsen seeks to identify the obstacles faced by students from economically and racially marginalized backgrounds which might mitigate their ability to continue on the premedical academic track or successfully matriculate into medical school. The findings for this project will be beneficial for faculty and administrators at institutions of higher education and medical schools designing equitable support and admissions policies.

Graduate Fellow

Lydia Orr is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Sociology at Temple University. Lydia holds a Masters of Public Administration from the Fels Institution of Government at the University of Pennsylvania and a Masters in the Art of Teaching from Relay Graduate School of Education. Before returning to graduate school, she was a middle school reading teacher and Dean of Academics in New York City.

Project Description

Lydia’s dissertation work thinks about libraries as durable institutions. Libraries are consistently ranked among the most trusted public institutions in the United States—often viewed more favorably than government agencies, media organizations, or even educational institutions—yet they are simultaneously framed as fragile, endangered, or obsolete. Across historical eras public discourse has positioned libraries as both dangerous and beneficial, dispensable and necessary, and corrupting and educative. They are described as relics of a print past and as vital civic infrastructure, as neutral repositories of knowledge, and as politically contested spaces. This project uses the public library as an analytic case to examine larger sociological questions about institutional legitimacy, organizational practice, capital formation, and trust. The potential implications of changeable social infrastructure for ameliorating urban poverty and supporting marginalized communities are of great policy importance.

Research Team Fellow

Dr. Mark Pollack is Professor in the Department of Political Science at Temple University. His current research focuses on the foreign policy of the second Trump administration and its impact on international law and institutions on the global trade regime.

Project Description

What happens when a U.S. president pulls the country out of international agreements or weakens global institutions—and can the next president easily reverse those decisions? This project explores why some unilateral foreign-policy moves have lasting effects, even after a change in administration, while others are more easily changed or overturned. Focusing on the transition from the first Trump administration to the Biden administration, we examine cases involving trade, climate change, arms control, and public health. Our research shows that it is often much easier for presidents to disrupt cooperation than to rebuild it. Domestic laws, political incentives, interest groups, and changing international relationships can all make reversals difficult and costly. For example, once tariffs are imposed, treaties abandoned, or institutions weakened, allies and rivals adapt in ways that may be hard to undo. By identifying the conditions under which U.S. foreign-policy decisions become “sticky,” the project will help policymakers think more clearly about how to restore international cooperation—and how to design institutions that are more resilient in the future.

Research Team Fellow

Dr. Jeffrey T. Ward is Associate Professor in the Department of Criminal Justice at Temple University. His research takes a developmental and life-course approach to understand causes and consequences of crime and criminal legal system involvement. His work has centered the role of physical and mental health for promoting desistance processes at different stages in the life course and unpacked contemporaneous and cascading effects of delinquent peers and gangs on crime and life course outcomes. His recent interdisciplinary funded project investigates resentencing, release, reentry, and recidivism outcomes for the “juvenile lifer” population who has been given a second chance at freedom following the Miller and Montgomery Supreme Court decisions.