Alex Ciomek
Postdoctoral Researcher at the Centre for Social Investigation at Nuffield College, University of Oxford
Alex Ciomek joined the University of Chicago as an Institute Postdoctoral Fellow & Crown Family School of Social Work, Policy, and Practice Postdoctoral Scholar after completing her Ph.D. in Sociology at Harvard University. Her research interests broadly include crime and deviance, social networks, urban sociology, gangs, and policing. Alex’s research utilizes social network analysis and data on police contacts to better understand the dynamic and spatial patterning of crime, building on her previous work examining the distribution of the concentration of crime across Boston using official data. She also uses network analysis to study gang membership in an urban context, including the validity of an official gang member label and how exposure to gunshot victimization within an urban network can influence life course outcomes. In addition to her academic work, Alex served as a Rappaport Institute Public Policy Fellow at the Boston Regional Intelligence Center in 2015. Alex received her M.S. in Criminology and her B.A. in Mathematics and Criminology at the University of Pennsylvania.