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Cindy Redcross of MDRC to Speak on Oct. 30

October 15, 2018

By Pamela Stallsmith

Cindy Redcross, deputy director of MDRC’s Health and Barriers to Employment policy area, will be the next speaker in the Wilder School Doctoral Lecture Series in Public Policy on Tuesday, October 30.

Redcross will discuss, "Questioning Assumptions:  A Journey Through Building Evidence on Criminal Justice." The lecture will take place in the Raleigh Building, room B0001, from 1-2:30 p.m.

The lecture series gives doctoral students the opportunity to learn from and engage with leading scholars in a variety of fields related to public policy. Four speakers will come to campus during the 2018-19 academic year, two in each semester. The lecture series is geared to graduate students, faculty and alumni of our Ph.D. program, and it is open to public.

Redcross’ expertise is in random assignment evaluations of programs that serve individuals involved in the criminal justice system. Currently, she is leading several projects evaluating interventions that target former prisoners and others involved in the justice system, including the U.S. Department of Labor’s multisite Enhanced Transitional Jobs Demonstration and the National Institute of Justice’s Demonstration Field Experiment: What Works in Reentry Research.

She is also leading a demonstration of a new employment-focused cognitive behavioral therapy intervention and is the deputy director of U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Building Bridges and Bonds project, which is testing the effectiveness of innovative strategies for working with low-income and disadvantaged fathers. Previously she served as project manager and research lead for other MDRC prisoner reentry studies, including the Center for Employment Opportunities evaluation, the multisite Transitional Jobs Reentry Demonstration, and the Rikers Island Jail Single Stop evaluation. Since joining MDRC in 1996, she has served as task lead on several large-scale random assignment evaluations.

The lecture series kicked off last month with a talk by Naim Kapucu, Ph.D., professor of public administration and policy and director of the School of Public Administration at the University of Central Florida.

The other dates and speakers are:

  • Monday, February 4, 2019: Brian Williams, Ph.D., visiting professor of public policy in the Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy, University of Virginia, who will discuss, “The Current State of Police-Community Relations: Opportunities Lost and Opportunity Costs.”
  • Monday, March 18, 2019: Teresa Cordova, Ph.D., director of the Great Cities Institute at the University of Illinois at Chicago, who will talk about “Research and the Shaping of Public Discourse: Joblessness and Violence in Chicago.”

For more information, contact Elsie Harper-Anderson, Ph.D., the Wilder School director of doctoral programs, at elharperande@vcu.edu.