UROP Project
***Neighborhood Defender Service Modeling and Analysis
Data Analysis, Court System, System modeling
Research Mentor: vwhite@eng.famu.fsu.edu Veronica White, Dr.
Department, College, Affiliation: FAMU-FSU College of Engineering, FAMU-FSU College of Engineering
Contact Email: vwhite@eng.famu.fsu.edu
Research Assistant Supervisor (if different from mentor): Alexis Andaverde
Research Assistant Supervisor Email: aa24cc@fsu.edu
Faculty Collaborators:
Faculty Collaborators Email:
Department, College, Affiliation: FAMU-FSU College of Engineering, FAMU-FSU College of Engineering
Contact Email: vwhite@eng.famu.fsu.edu
Research Assistant Supervisor (if different from mentor): Alexis Andaverde
Research Assistant Supervisor Email: aa24cc@fsu.edu
Faculty Collaborators:
Faculty Collaborators Email:
Looking for Research Assistants: Yes
Number of Research Assistants: 1
Relevant Majors: Open to all majors, with preference given to engineering, criminology/criminal justice, public health, social work, and related majors.
Project Location: Engineering Building B, option to work remotely or in-person
Research Assistant Transportation Required: Venom or FSU bus system to engineering campus Remote or In-person: Fully Remote
Approximate Weekly Hours: 7-10, Flexible schedule (Combination of business and outside of business. TBD between student and research mentor.)
Roundtable Times and Zoom Link:
Number of Research Assistants: 1
Relevant Majors: Open to all majors, with preference given to engineering, criminology/criminal justice, public health, social work, and related majors.
Project Location: Engineering Building B, option to work remotely or in-person
Research Assistant Transportation Required: Venom or FSU bus system to engineering campus Remote or In-person: Fully Remote
Approximate Weekly Hours: 7-10, Flexible schedule (Combination of business and outside of business. TBD between student and research mentor.)
Roundtable Times and Zoom Link:
- Day: Thursday, September 4
Start Time: 12:30
End Time: 1:00
Zoom Link: https://fsu.zoom.us/j/95629400981
Project Description
This project may go one of two ways:(1) Neighborhood Defender Service (NDS) is currently collecting data via a court observation study in Jackson, Mississippi to better understand differences in the city's two municipal courts. One court was the city’s original municipal court, and the other one is less than a year old, located in a more affluent area of the city. Municipal courts handle a wide range of hearings, from traffic tickets to misdemeanors to felonies. This is where the average citizen is most likely to come into contact with the criminal legal system. The original municipal court has relied largely on paper-based recordkeeping, which raises challenges for data analysis. The new municipal court has adopted electronic recordkeeping. NDS is working to compile comparable data for both courts. Because this effort involves significant person-hours to manually enter data from court dockets and to gather information from in-person court monitoring, NDS is seeking assistance from Pro Bono Analytics (PBA) to (1) review their processes, (2) provide guidance on streamlining and data management, and (3) make recommendations on metric development to appropriately answer questions for a comparative analysis of the two courts. NDS has a larger goal that their developed dataset will help reveal trends in legal representation, courtroom practices, defendant demographics, social service needs, and so on.
(2) Formalize the Neighborhood Defender Service holistic model as a system. Literature review of looking at other similar models and key mertics needed analyze the models success
Research Tasks: data collection, literature review, data analysis, academic writing
Skills that research assistant(s) may need: Excel (recommended)
data analysis (recommend)
academic writing (recommended)
Data management (recommended)
Metric development with categorical inputs and outputs (reccomended)
Experience with the U.S. legal system (reccomended)