Dr. Alejandro Gimenez-Santana has an M.Sc. and a Ph.D. in Global Affairs from Rutgers University. He is an Assistant Professor of Professional Practice in the School of Criminal Justice at Rutgers University, where he serves as Co-Executive Director of the Newark Public Safety Collaborative (NPSC). Before assuming the position of NPSC Co-Executive Director, he served as a consultant for the World Bank regional office in Bogotá, Colombia, and the Inter-American Development Bank in Montevideo, Uruguay. He has interned as a research analyst at the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs and Washington’s Fund for Peace.

As Principal Investigator (PI), Dr. Santana has secured over $5M in external funding in support of the Rutgers-Newark anchor initiative “Newark Public Safety Collaborative.” His contribution to the development of the Data-Informed Community Engagement model for crime prevention has been featured in national and international press outlets and, most recently, by the U.S. Department of Justice. Dr. Santana teaches graduate and undergraduate courses on crime mapping and comparative criminal justice systems across different cultures at the Rutgers University-Newark School of Criminal Justice. His research foci are spatial analytics, social disorganization, communities, and neighborhood effects on crime. He has extensively researched the association between unique contexts of social disorganization and the effect of the immediate built environment on the spatial distribution of violence and crime across various urban settings. He has over ten years of experience in the criminal justice field and has been invited to present at research and practitioner conferences in over a dozen countries across Europe, Latin America, and North America.