Hi, I'm Hannah. I am a researcher focused on criminalization, technology, and urban geography. I work to develop impact-oriented research, tell data-driven stories, and advocate for just policy and legislative change. 

My work investigates the political economy and influence of corporate developers on neighborhood arrests and policing patterns. I also show how predictive algorithms and surveillance are impacting policing, prosecution, and incarceration, with a particular focus on the human decision-makers behind these tools. I use statistical, spatial, and computational methods to analyze large-scale administrative and proprietary data. Additionally, I conduct qualitative interviews and archival analyses, particularly of legal and financial documents.  

I am currently a senior data scientist at Vera Institute of Justice working on data-driven projects to advance policy and research efforts throughout the criminal legal system. I am also a Ph.D. candidate and National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow in the Department of Sociology at Columbia University, where I manage a number of individual and collaborative projects. I am the project director on the Criminal Legal Algorithms, Technology, and Expertise project at the Trust Collaboratory, where my 2024 publication examines how DNA analysis software destabilizes legal expertise in the courtroom and obfuscates human decision-making processes. I am also a researcher for the Data and Racial Inequality Project and the Movements against Mass Incarceration Lab and have been a research fellow at the Columbia Justice Lab. My widely-cited 2021 publication found that 1 in 9 Black men in Pennsylvania are held in solitary confinement by the time they are 32, more than 8 times the risk that white men face. I have forthcoming publications on the relationship between Covid-induced employment loss and protest mobilization, and on technologies of criminalization.

I have volunteered as a data science consultant for the ACLU of Massachusetts, managed algorithmic surveillance research teams and oral history archives for Data for Black Lives, and collaborated on various projects with the Legal Aid Society, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and the office of NY State Assemblymember Zohran Mamdani. I continue to work with nonprofits and local government offices on non-carceral solutions to community safety, creating interactive data visualizations and conducting large-scale community interview projects.​ Previously, I worked as a senior data scientist in digital media marketing, managing big data and machine learning projects in R, Python, and SQL. 

My full CV is available here. 

Please feel free to reach out at hpullenblasnik@gmail.com.