A warm CrimSL welcome to Dr. Ángela Zorro Medina, who joined us as Assistant Professor on August 6, 2024!
Ángela completed her doctorate in the science of law at Yale Law School in 2021, where she studied the consequences of the Latin American criminal procedure revolution on crime rates, incarceration rates, and the administration of justice in the region. As an expert on adversarial procedural reform in Latin America, she has advised the Colombian Ministry of Justice and Colombian Congress Representatives in assessing and designing criminal justice and penitentiary public policies. At Yale, Angela was awarded the Kauffman Fellowship in Law and Economics at the John M. Olin Center and the Fox International Fellowship to spend a year in Sciences Po, Paris, as a visiting researcher.
In 2018, she joined the University of Chicago as a Neubauer Family Distinguished Doctoral Fellow in Sociology, as part of a group of outstanding academic scholars who had demonstrated their promise to make important contributions to their fields. At the University of Chicago, Angela joined the Justice Project, a group of scholars that seek to bring together academia and public policy by blending social sciences with multi-city projects on neighborhood violence, redistricting, and policing. Ángela is firmly committed to transparent and replicable social sciences as part of the Justice Project, making all codebooks, data, and data agreements public.
Ángela’s broad research agenda involves creating a data centre at the University of Toronto that contributes to quantitative research on criminal justice in the global south. She is thrilled to join a world-class university with such a strong group of scholars working on advancing our knowledge of the global south. Following her work on the U.S. data collection and making it publicly available as part of the Justice Project, she intends to continue democratizing criminal justice data. Her work on criminal justice has been funded by the Horowitz Foundation and the Institute of Humane Studies, among others.
Ángela grew up in Bogotá, Colombia, and lived in the United States for a decade before moving to Toronto. She is obsessed with cats, and she has been working with tutors of rescue cats in Toronto to improve the lives of their feline family members. She spends her free time learning about cat behaviour and how to modify unwanted behaviours. She rescued her current cat, Ciceron, in a rural town in Colombia during the COVID-19 pandemic, and he accompanied her to Chicago. Now, he is a full Torontonian.
Please join us in welcoming Ángela to our community!