Dean of criminal justice school named

The appointment of Dr. Alan Lizotte as the new dean of the School of Criminal Justice was announced last week by University at Albany President George Philip.
 

Lizotte has served as the Interim Dean of the School of Criminal Justice since July 2009 and is known as one of the nation’s leading experts on gun use and violence, criminology and juvenile delinquency. 

“I am confident that under Dr. Lizotte’s leadership, the school’s reputation will grow as a top-tier research program, expanding its role in our community and nation while it fosters new international relationships,” President Philip said in a press release.

A national search headed by the Rockefeller College of Public Affairs and Policy’s Dean Jeffrey Straussman resulted in the appointment of the influential and distinguished faculty member.

Hailing from Colorado, Lizotte recalled doing very poorly in high school. He later went on to serve in the U.S. Navy from 1966 to 1970 as Second Class Petty Officer with the USS Jouett and Inshore Undersea Warfare Group One, Unit Two.
After receiving funds from the G.I. Bill, Lizotte enrolled in a local community college in Massachusetts for a year and later transferred to Brown University, an Ivy League school.

Lizotte’s slow start in high school in did not hinder his future academic success. In 1974, he received his B.A. from Brown University for Sociology with Honors and later went on to complete his M.A (‘76) and Ph.D. (‘79) in Sociology from the University of Illinois.

Lizotte recalled his interest in Criminal Justice developing during his matriculation at Brown University. He encountered criminologist Colin Loftin within the Sociology Department and was motivated to emulate him.

Ironically, Dr. Loftin is presently a member of the School of Criminal Justice’s faculty that Lizotte now heads.

Lizotte’s teaching career began in 1978 when he served as an assistant professor within the Sociology Department at Emory University.  However, it was evident that his focus and passion still remained within criminology. Some courses he taught included Deviance and Criminology.

The School of Criminal Justice has been consistently ranked as one of the top two graduate programs in the nation.

Recently, US News & World Report has ranked the School of Criminal Justice as the number two graduate school surpassed by the University at Maryland by only three-tenths of a point.

Lizotte has many plans to ensure the School of Criminal Justice remains top-ranked nationwide. Such plans include, “pumping up the faculty,” expanding the school’s community service programs in order to remain highly visible and hiring only the best and most talented faculty at all levels.

Lizotte has been the recipient of several honors awards. Most recently, he was awarded the UAlbany President’s Award for Excellence in Research and UAlbany’s Graduate Student Association’s Faculty Award for Excellence in Graduate Student Development. 
He has also received the American Society of Criminology’s Michael J. Hindelang Award in 2003 for most outstanding contribution to research in criminology.

Although the recipient of many awards, Lizotte continues to remain modest and considers all of his awards to be prized and does not favor one over another.

He is a founding member and co-principal investigator of the Rochester Youth Development Study which is a longitudinal study of 1,000 students who were in the seventh and eighth grades in the Rochester Public School System and continued to study them and their families. This type of longitudinal study is very rare in that it has been able to study three generations of families and observe how delinquency is passed on from one generation to the next. The findings resulted from this study are numerous and have resulted in the publication of many results.

Lizotte recognized his previous experience as an Associate Dean for the Undergraduate Studies of the School of Criminal Justice aided him during his transition period.

He quickly recognized the transition of serving as Interim Dean to be difficult.  Lizotte said  serving as Dean is both challenging and demanding and he has worked hard in order to guarantee that he adequately excelled in all demands of the position.