Teaching Faculty Profiles

Richard Berk
Professor of Criminology and Statistics
B.A., Yale University, 1964; Ph.D., Johns Hopkins University, 1970

Email: berkr@sas.upenn.edu
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Research Areas

Professor Berk works on a wide variety of issues in criminology, including inmate classification and placement systems, law enforcement strategies for reducing domestic violence, the role of race in capital punishment, detecting violations of environmental regulations, claims that the death penalty serves as a general deterrent, and forecasting short-term changes in urban crime patterns. He is equally active on a range of methodological concerns, such as causal inference, statistical learning, and methods for evaluating social programs.

Current Projects

Professor Berk is currently working on a project, funded by the National Science Foundation, on the development and application of statistical learning procedures for data sets in the behavioral, social and economic sciences. Among the key applications are anticipating failures on probation or parole and forecasting crime “hot spots” a week in advance. Other current methodological research includes environmental monitoring, projecting the number of homeless in urban areas, and forecasting transitions between weather regimes.

Academic Positions Held

1970-1973: Assistant Professor of Sociology and Urban Affairs Northwestern University
1973-1976: Associate Professor, Department of Sociology and the Center for Urban Affairs Northwestern University
1976-1987: Professor of Sociology, University of California, Santa Barbara
1983-1987: Director, Social Process Research Institute, University of California, Santa Barbara
1986-1987: Professor of Sociology and Statistics, University of California, Santa Barbara
1988-1997: Professor of Sociology, University of California, Los Angeles
1990-1997: Director, Center for the Study of the Environment and Society, University of California, Los Angeles
1997-2002: Director, UCLA Statistical Consulting Center
1997-2006: Distinguished Professor of Statistics and Sociology, University of California, Los Angeles
2006- present: Professor of Criminology and Statistics, University of Pennsylvania

Career and Recent Professional Awards

Elected to the Sociological Research Association

Elected Fellow to the American Association for the Advancement of Science

Paul S. Lazarsfeld Award for methodological contributions from the American Sociological Association

Elected Fellow of the American Statistical Association

Elected Fellow of the Academy of Experimental Criminology

Representive Publications

“Multilevel Statistical Models and Ecological Scaling” with Jan de Leeuw, in Scaling and Uncertainty Analysis in Ecology: Methods and Applications, Jianguo Wu, Bruce Jones, Habin Li, and Orie Loucks (eds.), Springer Press, 2006.

“Statistical Learning Procedures for Monitoring Regulatory Compliance: An Application to Fisheries Data,” with Cleridy Lennert-Cody, Journal of the Royal Statistical Society (Series A), 170(3): 671-689, 2007.

“Weather Regime Prediction Using Statistical Learning,“ with Alex Deloncle, Fabio D'Andrea, and Michael Ghil, Journal of Atmospheric Sciences, 64 (5): 1619-1635, 2007.

“Meta-Analysis and Statistical Inference," (with commentary), Journal of Experimental Criminology, 3(3): 247-270, 2007.

“Predicting Weather Regime Transitions in Northern Hemisphere Datasets,“ with D. Kondrashov, Jason Shen, Fabio D'Andrea, and Michael Ghil, Climate Dynamics, forthcoming.

“Overdisperson and Poisson Regression,“ with John MacDonald, Journal of Quantitative Criminology, forthcoming.

“Forecasting Methods in Crime and Justice,“ Annual Review of Law and Social Science, forthcoming.

“How You Can Tell if the Simulations in Computational Criminology Are Any Good,“ Journal of Experimental Criminology, forthcoming.

“Forecasting Murder Within a Population of Probationers and Parolees: A High Stakes Application of Statistical Learning,“ with Lawrence Sherman, Geoffrey Barnes, Ellen Kurtz, and Lindsay Ahlman, Journal of the Royal Statistical Society (Series A), forthcoming.

“On Weighting Regressions by Propensity Scores,“ with David Freedman, Evaluation Review, forthcoming.

“Counting the Homeless in Los Angeles County,“ with Brian Kriegler and Don Ylvisaker, in Probability and Statistics: Essays in Honor of David A. Freedman, Monograph Series for the Institute of Mathematical Statistics, D. Nolan and S. Speed (eds.), forthcoming.

Statistical Learning from a Regression Perspective, New York: Springer, in press.

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