Joel A. Capellan, Ph.D.

capellan@rowan.edu
856-256-4500 extension 53847
Joel's Website
C.V.

Dr. Joel Capellan is an Assistant Professor of Law and Justice Studies at Rowan University. He received his Ph.D. in Criminal Justice from the CUNY Graduate Center in 2016. Prior to his doctoral studies, Dr. Capellan earned an M.A. in Social Science research from the University of Chicago and a B.A. from Buffalo State College.

Professor Capellan specializes in statistics and spatial analysis. Substantively, his research interests are broad.  He has conducted and published research on state-sponsored repression, segregation, mass public shootings, lone wolf terrorism, policing bias, and criminological and sociological theories. Currently, he is devoting most of my attention to the study of mass public shootings. Mass public shootings have been an incredibly understudied phenomenon. Research on this topic has been hindered by data availability. To solve this problem, Dr. Capellan constructed a database of mass public shootings in the United States from 1960 to 2014. This database, created from open-source materials, contains demographic information on offenders and victims, as well as incident-level data on preparation, execution, and conclusion of the attacks. With this data, Professor Capellan attempts to shed light on crucial unanswered aspects of this phenomenon.