Jeffrey Ulmer

Dr. Jeffery T. Ulmer earned in Ph.D. in Sociology in 1993 from Penn State University, and was Assistant to Associate Professor of Sociology at Purdue University from 1994-2000.  He is best known for his influential research on state and federal courts and disparities in criminal sentencing, and in capital murder cases.  His research in this area has been among the most cited and impactful social science works in this area since the 1990s.  He also has published impactful research on religion and crime, religion, moral foundations, and criminal punishment, social structural influences on violent crime, and sociological theory.  

He was named an ASC Fellow in 2021, and received the 2001 Distinguished New Scholar Award and the 2012 Distinguished Scholar Award from the ASC’s Division on Corrections and Sentencing.  He and his coauthors won the ASC’s 2012 Outstanding Article Award.  He and Darrell Steffensmeier were also awarded the ASC’s 2006 Hindelang Award for Confessions of a Dying Thief: Understanding Criminal Careers and Illegal Enterprise (2005, Transaction). He has received funding for his research from the National Science Foundation, National Institute of Justice, the Pennsylvania Interbranch Commission on Gender, Racial, and Ethnic Fairness, the Pennsylvania Commission on Sentencing, and others.