Volkan Topalli

Ph.D., Tulane University

Crime Policy, Urban Violence, Exponential Crime

Volkan Topalli is Professor of Criminal Justice and Criminology at the Andrew Young School of Policy Studies and current Editor-in-Chief of the journal, Criminology. He received his PhD in Experimental Social Psychology from Tulane University in 1998. Before arriving at Georgia State University (GSU) in 2000 he completed a National Science Foundation research fellowship through the National Consortium on Violence Research. He holds faculty associate status with the Evidence-Based Cybersecurity Group at GSU, the Partnership of Urban Health Research at GSU, the Center for Injury Control at Emory University, and the International Centre for Research on Forensic Psychology at Portsmouth University, United Kingdom.

He maintains two streams of research employing a mix of quantitative and qualitative (ethnographic) methods. With a focus on the “active offender” model of data collection, Prof. Topalli’s research incorporates insights from extensive interviews conducted over two decades with noninstitutionalized, hardened street offenders across cities like New Orleans, St. Louis, and Atlanta. These insights have been instrumental in shaping his recent work on community-driven, collaborative strategies for violence prevention—a synthesis of community-based participatory methods with advanced technological strategies, including artificial intelligence, machine learning, agent-based modeling, and geographic information systems. Expanding the purview of this research, Prof. Topalli also investigates the impact of accelerating technological changes on crime, exploring how such advancements disrupt conventional crime models and create complex, systemic issues referred to as “wicked problems” in policy research.

Prof. Topalli’s work has attracted support from various funding agencies including the National Science Foundation, the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, the Centers for Disease Control, the UK Home Office, and the National Institute of Justice. His scholarly contributions include a spectrum of peer-reviewed articles published in top-tier journals such as Criminology, the Annual Review of Criminology, Computers in Human Behavior, the European Journal of Information Systems, Justice Quarterly, the Journal of Quantitative Criminology, the British Journal of Criminology, the Journal of Law and Economics, and Criminal Justice & Behavior.