Dr. Denise Paquette Boots, professor of public policy and political economy at The University of Texas at Dallas, became president of the Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences (ACJS) in March during the group’s annual conference in Las Vegas.
ACJS is an international organization that seeks to foster professional development, scholarship, criminal justice education, research and policy analysis in the field of criminal justice. With about 1,800 members, ACJS includes a diverse group of academics, students and practitioners working within all sectors of the criminal justice system in the U.S. and many other countries.
“As a longtime faculty member here at UT Dallas whose work centers around public policy, I look forward to promoting our programs as I serve in this leadership role and travel to various meetings with criminal justice stakeholders, professionals and scholars in the United States and abroad,” she said.
Boots first joined ACJS as a master’s degree student over 20 years ago. She said the organization has had a significant role in shaping her professional development as a scholar, her grant work and in influencing her teaching.
Boots’ goals for her yearlong presidency include strengthening UT Dallas’ ties with academics, educators and professionals; seeking opportunities for students; and promoting the social and criminal justice policy work within the ACJS. She is now planning ACJS’ 2023 annual meeting in National Harbor, Maryland. The conference theme will be “60 Years of ACJS: Critical Connections Between Civil Rights, Crime and Social Justice.”
Boots is also a senior research fellow with the Institute for Urban Policy Research and associate dean of undergraduate education in the School of Economic, Political and Policy Sciences. Her research and teaching focus on interpersonal violence, with an emphasis on issues related to family violence, child abuse, mental health, parricide, human trafficking and the death penalty.
Hansen Earns IEEE Service Award
Dr. John Hansen, professor of electrical engineering at The University of Texas at Dallas, will be honored with the 2021 Leo L. Beranek Meritorious Service Award from the IEEE Signal Processing Society for his service and leadership in the professional organization.
The IEEE will honor Hansen at its 2022 International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP), scheduled in May in Singapore.
Hansen is associate dean for research, founder and director of the Center for Robust Speech Systems, and Distinguished Chair in Telecommunications in the Erik Jonsson School of Engineering and Computer Science.
His research interests include digital speech processing, speaker trait assessment, speech and speaker recognition, and human-computer interaction. He has served on IEEE committees and as a journal editor, and he co-organized the ICASSP in Dallas in 2010.
“IEEE service takes on many forms. And while serving as associate editor on journals, organizing conferences and supporting fellow nominations are all part of it, my greatest reward is seeing students benefit from attending IEEE events, including the 78 UT Dallas students we had as volunteers for IEEE ICASSP in Dallas,” Hansen said.