Urban Science Innovators: Branden DuPont

NYU CUSP is pleased to host our Innovators Series, featuring the achievements and groundbreaking work of our partners in their respective industries. The series highlights the impact these partners are making and inspires students to think creatively about their career paths.

About the Speaker 

Branden, Deputy Director of Analytics at the Loyola Chicago Center for Criminal Justice, is an experienced data scientist and public technologist. His work revolves around using data, visualization, and analytics to address social problems with a focus on criminal and civil justice policy.

His recent efforts have included building more than 12 public prosecutor dashboards in Wisconsin, Illinois, Florida, and Colorado to track key performance indicators, uncovering racial disparities in arrest and conviction rates for marijuana possession in Wisconsin, and examining whether the impact of Chicago’s General Order 18.8A affected crime rates.

Branden built Milwaukee’s first eviction tracking system which allowed local stakeholders to identify where evictions are happening, when they’re also associated with code violations, and which landlords are the city’s most prolific evictors. His research and project interests include public tech development, housing policy, computational law, and data visualization. He has a Masters of Science from New York University in Applied Urban Science and Informatics and a Bachelors in Political Science from the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee.

At the Loyola CCJ he works on several projects including a 4 year evaluation of the Illinois Pretrial Fairness Act (which most notably abolishes cash bail statewide) and prosecutorial transparency.