Dr. Dee Wood Harper was named Professor of the Year for the College of Social Sciences in 2008.

From academic year 2007 to the present, Dr. Harper has made nine presentations of his research at the Southern Sociological Society, Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences, American Society of Criminology, British Society of Criminology, European Society of Criminology and the International Policy Executive Symposium. He has four articles out for review in such journals as Sociological Spectrum, Deviant Behavior, American Journal of Economics and Sociology and Computational Statistics and Data Analysis. He has also published three research papers and one book chapter since 2007.

A 2008 paper on the use of an artificial intelligence in predicting death penalty outcomes (co-authored with Stamos Karamouzis) received international attention and was written up in New Scientist and Scientific American. The theoretical paper on homicide followed by suicide (co-authored with Lydia Voigt) was cited by Professor Doctor Dietrich Oberwittler of the Max Planck Institute and Director of the European Homicide Suicide Study Group as “truly inspiring.”

Finally, and in many ways most gratifying to him, one of his former graduate students, Kelly Frailing, has received her Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge. His research agenda continues to focus on the problem of murder in New Orleans. The paper on the analysis of longitudinal zero-inflated count data submitted to Computational Statistics and Data Analysis an attempt to develop a new method to explain variation in murder in New Orleans at the neighborhood level spanning 60 years.