Denise Gottfredson

Denise Gottfredson, born Denise Claire Ruff, is an American criminologist and professor in the department of criminal justice and criminology at the University of Maryland, College Park, where she became an assistant professor in 1986 and a full professor in 1995. She is an expert on school violence and juvenile delinquency, recognised for applying program evaluation to crime prevention initiatives such as Drug Abuse Resistance Education, the Strengthening Families Program and the Baltimore City Drug Treatment Court, and for finding that school resource officers spend about half their time on law enforcement activities. She was vice president of the American Society of Criminology from 2005 to 2006 and editor-in-chief of its journal Criminology from 2005 to 2011, and is a fellow of the society and of the Academy of Experimental Criminology. She earned her Ph.D. at Johns Hopkins University in 1980.