Dr. Colleen Berryessa is an Associate Professor at the Rutgers School of Criminal Justice, where she has taught since 2018. Using interdisciplinary qualitative and quantitative methods, her research examines how psychological processes, social contexts, and attitudes shape the criminal justice system — with a particular focus on public perceptions of sentencing, judicial decision-making, and forms of punishment beyond formal criminal justice stages. Dr. Berryessa holds a Ph.D. in Criminology from the University of Pennsylvania, a B.A. in Government and Mind, Brain, and Behavior from Harvard University, and served as a CIRGE research fellow at the Stanford Center for Biomedical Ethics.
