M. Cristina Layana, Ph.D. is a Senior Data Scientist for the University of Pennsylvania Crime and Justice Police Lab. Her work at the lab includes the Group Violence Reduction Strategy in Baltimore City. Before joining the University of Pennsylvania, Cristina served as Deputy Director for the Group Violence Reduction Strategy with the Baltimore City Mayor’s Office of Neighborhood Safety and Engagement (MONSE). In this role, she was responsible for the design, development, implementation, scale and maintenance of Baltimore’s Group Violence Reduction Strategy. Prior to that, Cristina was the Lead Warrants Service Analyst for the City of Baltimore and provided criminological expertise and advanced quantitative support to the CitiStat team on PoliceStat topics and analyses.
Cristina obtained her Doctorate degree from the Department of Criminal Justice and Criminology at the University of Maryland, College Park. During her graduate school career, she worked in various National Institute of Justice grants to study various aspects of white-collar and corporate crime. In 2018, she was awarded a grant from Maryland’s Governor Larry Hogan to conduct a program evaluation for a restorative justice non-profit organization in Baltimore City. She has an M.S. in Criminal Justice from the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, where she focused her studies on criminal decision-making methodologies. She also has a B.S. in Psychology from Belmont Abbey College.
