Chris Melde

Director, School of Criminal Justice

Chris Melde is Director and Professor in the School of Criminal Justice at Michigan State University. He is an affiliated faculty member in Global Urban Studies and the Institute for Public Policy and Social Research at Michigan State University, and a research associate at the Michigan Justice Statistics Center. He serves as a subject matter expert with the University of Michigan’s National Center for School Safety, focusing on the role of law enforcement in school-based delinquency prevention. His primary research interests include street gangs, youth violence, crime prevention, individual and community reactions to crime and victimization risk, and program evaluation. He is currently the principal investigator or co-principal investigator on several funded projects, including a National Institute of Justice (NIJ) funded randomized controlled trial of a comprehensive school safety initiative and an NIJ funded city-level mixed methods study on the association between immigration and victimization. Dr. Melde was awarded the 2015 Tory J. Caeti Memorial Award from the Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences Juvenile Justice section, given in recognition of the contribution of emerging scholars to the field of juvenile justice, for his work on gangs and youth violence prevention.