Biography:
Ryan Bowman is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Criminology at Pennsylvania State University. His research interests include sentencing, recidivism, racial and ethnic disparities in the criminal justice system, and incidents of mass violence.
Ryan received a B.A. in Criminology and a B.A. in Political Science from Villanova University. While at Villanova, he served as President for the Villanova University Undergraduate Mock Trial team, and completed independent research projects with various professors analyzing county-level sentencing patterns across the state of Pennsylvania. After graduation he worked as a legal assistant at a family law firm in Worcester, Massachusetts, assisting the firm’s attorneys prepare for court proceedings and interacting with the family court system on a regular basis. While at Penn State he has conducted qualitative research on perpetrators of mass violence, analyzed years of data from the Pennsylvania Commission on Sentencing, and defended a master’s thesis on how county-level racial and ethnic composition changes can influence individual-level sentencing outcomes.