Gary LaFree

Gary LaFree is an American sociologist and criminologist who is professor and former chair of the Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice at the University of Maryland, College Park. He is the founding director of the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism, known as START, a university-based research center that built and maintains the Global Terrorism Database, one of the most widely used open-source datasets on terrorist attacks worldwide, and his research applies criminological methods and comparative, cross-national analysis to political violence alongside his longstanding work on race and violent crime. He served as president of the American Society of Criminology from 2005 to 2006 and was named a Fellow of the society in 2007.