Hunter Boehme

Hunter M. Boehme, Ph.D., is an Associate Professor in the Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice at the University of South Carolina. His research covers a broad range of policing topics, including officer mental health, police de-escalation, police-executed violence and crime prevention strategies, and public perceptions of police.

His current work focuses on rigorously implementing and evaluating evidence-based violence and crime prevention strategies executed by police agencies. In collaboration with police agencies across the country, he has developed and evaluated several crime prevention strategies, including focused deterrence programs, hot spot policing and problem-oriented policing strategies, blight abatement and code enforcement interventions, property crime interventions, among others. Further, he tests new and innovative police strategies to reduce violence/crime without excessive police-public contact, while minimizing the resources required to execute the intervention.

His research has been funded by the National Institute of Justice, Bureau of Justice Assistance, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, totaling over $1.5 million. He also has worked on other state and locally funded projects in collaboration with police agencies and criminal justice partners. Dr. Boehme’s research has been published in impact journals including Criminology & Public Policy, Crime Science, Criminal Justice and Behavior, Journal of Criminal Justice, Journal of Experimental Criminology, Crime & Delinquency, Police Quarterly, among others.

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Kait Boyle

Kaitlin Boyle, PhD, is an Associate Professor in the Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice at the University of South Carolina. Dr. Boyle has published on individual and community predictors of sexual violence and intimate partner homicide as well as the cognitive, psychological, and behavioral outcomes of sexual victimization and trauma. She often employs general strain theory, affect control theory, and feminist perspectives on gender and masculinity when examining these factors.

Dr. Boyle's work has investigated how social factors such as stigma, perceptions of justice, and cultural norms shape the outcomes of sexual assault, including PTSD symptoms and whether women report sexual assault to police and label themselves as “victims.” On the perpetration side, she examines how peer norms and dynamics facilitate sexual violence and the effect of masculinity threats on aggression, gun violence, and violence against women. Dr. Boyle also takes social inequality and policy approaches to understanding patterns in homicide rates, with a focus on women, women of color, and intimate partner perpetration. She has investigated associations between Black women’s political power and homicide victimization rates; state-level reproductive care access and homicide rates among pregnant women; and how firearm laws that restrict firearm access for those convicted of sexual assault, stalking, or intimate partner violence shape intimate partner homicide rates.

Dr. Boyle’s work has been published in journals such as Criminology, JAMA Network Open, Journal of Interpersonal Violence, Feminist Criminology, Social Psychology Quarterly, and Journal of Research on Crime and Delinquency. She is currently a McCausland Faculty Fellow at USC, the premier faculty fellowship in the McCausland College of Arts and Sciences (2026-2029). In addition to $50,000 in internal grants and awards, Dr. Boyle has served as a Co-PI on two federal grants focused on victims of violence through the Bureau of Justice Assistance and National Institute of Justice.

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Brent Klein

Brent R. Klein, Ph.D., is Associate Professor in the Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice at the University of South Carolina. He studies how aggressive behavior is produced, particularly the mechanisms that turn situational pressure into violent action.

His current work focuses on three of these: the momentary psychological state that drives a person to act aggressively, how intentions do and do not translate into behavior, and a framework for classifying interpersonal behaviors that standard models overlook. He also conducts applied policy evaluation, using causal-inference methods to test whether firearm laws reduce violence, including studies of extreme risk protection orders (ERPOs) and child access prevention laws.

Dr. Klein is the sole creator of the "Pathways to School Shootings" longitudinal study and co-developer of "The American School Shooting Study (TASSS)" and "Comparative Gun Violence Project." He works with current empirical methods and has helped advance open-source research in criminology. He has led or co-led over $2.7 million in federally funded research projects on topics such as school shootings, firearm violence and lethality, mass and targeted violence, and domestic terrorism and extremism. Klein's research has been published in leading journals such as JAMA Pediatrics, Criminology, the Annual Review of Criminology, Justice Quarterly, and Criminology & Public Policy, and has been cited in White House briefings, congressional testimony, and national media.

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Allison Kurpiel

Allison Kurpiel, Ph.D., is an Assistant Professor in Criminology and Criminal Justice at the University of South Carolina. Her research program focuses on the experiences of youth who have been victimized, as well as youth who have been exposed to violence in their school, home, or community.

Her current work concentrates on two main areas. The first investigates biased victimization (or victimization perpetrated on the basis of prejudice against the race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, disability, or religion of the victim) in the school setting. The second examines victimization in the form of child maltreatment and its connection to juvenile justice involvement. Throughout her work, she focuses on the role of institutions (e.g., schools, juvenile justice systems) in maintaining or perpetuating social inequalities.

Dr. Kurpiel has worked to procure and leverage underutilized administrative data, including as a research fellow at the University of Edinburgh under the Scottish Centre for Administrative Data Research. There, she liaised with practitioners and policymakers across various public sector organizations to gain access to linked police and healthcare data. In South Carolina, she is leading a funded project initiating administrative data linkage, which will lead to the development of a unique, state-level, longitudinal dataset combining data from the education, child welfare, and juvenile justice systems. Her research appears in outlets such as Justice Quarterly, Child Abuse & Neglect, Criminology & Public Policy, and The British Journal of Criminology.

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Wendy Regoeczi

Wendy C. Regoeczi, Ph.D., M.P.H., is Professor and Chair of the Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice at the University of South Carolina. She studies the causes, patterns, investigations, and prevention of violence, particularly with respect to homicide, intimate partner violence, and sexual assault.

Her current work focuses on three specific areas. The first aims to improve our understanding of understudied subpopulations in the homicide literature, including female homicide perpetrators and homicide victimization of older male adults. The second concentrates on improving the identification and documentation of non-fatal strangulation in cases of intimate partner violence and sexual assault. The third involves evaluations of lethality assessments in cases of intimate partner violence.

Dr. Regoeczi’s research has been funded by the National Institute of Justice, National Science Foundation (NSF), and Arnold Ventures and appears in such outlets as Criminology, JAMA Network Open, Justice Quarterly, Homicide Studies, the Journal of Forensic Sciences, and Child Abuse & Neglect. She is the former editor of the journal Homicide Studies and co-authored the Bureau of Justice Statistics’ publication The Nation’s Two Measures of Homicide. With Professor Randolph Roth at the Ohio State University, she is working on the completion of an NSF-funded project to build a comprehensive dataset of homicides in Ohio from 1959 to the present.

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Tara Sutton

Dr. Tara E. Sutton, Ph.D., is an Associate Professor in the Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice at the University of South Carolina. Dr. Sutton’s work on gender-based violence perpetration and victimization incorporates and tests queer criminology and feminist criminology perspectives as well as other major criminological theories.

Specifically, her research addresses child abuse, sexual assault, intimate partner violence, and the cycle of violence, especially among LGBTQIA+ people, women, and Black youth. Her work often incorporates various forms of trauma (i.e., racial discrimination, adverse childhood experiences) and their consequences (i.e., substance use, mental health difficulties) as factors shaping involvement in gender-based violence. For example, a recent study addressed anticipated discrimination, perceived discrimination, and internalized homonegativity as moderators of the association between childhood sexual abuse and adulthood sexual assault victimization among LGBTQIA2S+ young adult men. In another recent piece, she examined aspects of masculinity, including male peer support and anger, as links between men’s experiences of childhood abuse and intimate partner violence perpetration during college.

Dr. Sutton is currently serving as a Co-Investigator on a 5-year longitudinal study funded by the National Institutes of Health to address population-specific and general risk factors for sexual assault perpetration and victimization among a group of racially diverse LGBTQIA2S+ men. This study is the first to examine sexual assault in a national sample of US sexual minority men. She has received Emerging Scholar Awards from two divisions of the American Society of Criminology. Her work has been published in Criminology, Journal of Interpersonal Violence, Feminist Criminology, Violence Against Women, and Trauma, Violence, & Abuse, among others.

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Brandon Tregle

Brandon Tregle, J.D., Ph.D., is the Director of Research for the Excellence in Policing and Public Safety (EPPS) Program at the Joseph F. Rice School of Law and an affiliate Assistant Professor in the Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice at the University of South Carolina. Dr. Tregle brings more than a decade of policing experience to his academic work. He co-leads a portfolio of multi-million-dollar projects across several major U.S. cities, implementing and evaluating evidence-based practices addressing issues such as violent crime, property crime, case clearance, and focused deterrence. Dr. Tregle also serves as Chair of the Executive Board of the American Society for Evidence-Based Policing. His recent scholarly work appears in the Journal of Crime and Justice, Justice Quarterly, and Police Quarterly.

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Paige Vaughn

Dr. Paige E. Vaughn, Ph.D., is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice at the University of South Carolina. Her research broadly focuses on violent crime reduction, criminal justice policy, and public perceptions of safety and justice; and she is currently researching gun violence reduction, police responses to violence, and perceptions of violence and efforts to reduce it. She is committed to advancing evidence-based policy and practice through applied research conducted in collaboration with criminal justice practitioners and communities affected by crime.

Dr. Vaughn has worked on several large-scale applied research projects funded by the National Institute of Justice and Arnold Ventures, and her work has been published in Criminology, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Criminology and Public Policy, Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency, Journal of Experimental Criminology, and Justice Quarterly. Her recent violence reduction research conducted in partnership with Dr. Rick Rosenfeld, the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department, the Missouri Department of Corrections, and individuals with prior firearm-related arrests received the International Association of Chiefs of Police Leadership in Law Enforcement Research Award.

Dr. Vaughn currently serves as the lead evaluator of a hospital-based violence intervention program in Mobile, Alabama and as Co-PI on a randomized controlled trial evaluation of a focused deterrence intervention that aims to lower youth violence in Richland County, SC.

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