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. I have published on a number of topics, including the population level harms of solitary confinement for Black men, the impact of carceral technology and the associated expertise challenges that software poses in the courtroom, and the relationships between economic crisis and protests against police violence. Work in progress examines the relationship between corporate real estate development, regulation, and policing patterns throughout New York City. 

I am the project director on the Criminal Legal Algorithms, Technology, and Expertise project at the Trust Collaboratory, a researcher with the Data and Racial Inequality Project, the Movements against Mass Incarceration Lab, and previously the Columbia Justice Lab. I have volunteered research and data science expertise for nonprofits and government offices including the ACLU of Massachusetts, Data for Black Lives, 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.