In June 2022, President Biden appointed Alexis R. Piquero, PhD, to be Director of OJP’s Bureau of Justice Statistics. Dr. Piquero was sworn in as Director on August 15, 2022. The Bureau of Justice Statistics is the primary statistical agency of the Department of Justice, whose mission is to collect, publish, and disseminate information on crime, criminal offenders, victims of crime, and the operation of justice systems at all levels of government. As head of BJS, Dr. Piquero leads the Bureau’s activities on a range of data collection on matters related to crime and the justice system.
Dr. Piquero is a nationally and internationally recognized criminologist with more than 25 years of experience. His expertise ranges from criminal careers to criminal justice policy and crime prevention to the intersection of race and crime, with a focus on quantitative methodology. Dr. Piquero has published over 500 scholarly articles and several books and served as editor of the Journal of Quantitative Criminology and the Justice Evaluation Journal. He is a Fellow of both the American Society of Criminology and the Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences. In 2019, he received the Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences Bruce Smith Sr. Award for outstanding contributions to criminal justice, and in 2020, he received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Division of Developmental and Life-Course Criminology of the American Society of Criminology.
Over the course of his career, Dr. Piquero has served on several National Academy of Sciences/National Research Council panels, including Evaluating the National Institute of Justice and A Prioritized Plan to Implement a Developmental Approach in Juvenile Justice Reform, as well as most recently the Panel on Modernizing the Nation’s Crime Statistics. He has given congressional testimony on evidence-based crime prevention practices and has provided counsel and support to several local, state, national and international criminal justice agencies. In 2015, U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder appointed him to the Office of Justice Programs Science Advisory Board. More recently, in March 2021, he was elected to the Council on Criminal Justice.
Prior to joining BJS, Dr. Piquero served as Professor and Chair of the Department of Sociology and Criminology as well as Arts and Sciences Distinguished Professor at the University of Miami, as well as Professor of Criminology at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia. He has held several academic appointments at the University of Texas at Dallas, University of Maryland College Park, as well as John Jay College of Criminal Justice. Dr. Piquero holds a PhD, a master’s degree, and a bachelor’s degree in criminology and criminal justice from the University of Maryland College Park.