Ashley M. Mancik is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice at the University of South Carolina, where she teaches undergraduate and graduate courses on homicide, communities and crime, the American criminal justice system, and quantitative methods. She earned her B.A. in Criminal Justice from the University of Georgia in 2011 and her M.A. and Ph.D. in Criminology from the University of Delaware in 2015 and 2018, respectively. Her areas of expertise include lethal and non-lethal violence, crime trends, and crime clearance, with a current emphasis on gun violence, domestic violence, and mass violence. She regularly conducts interviews with journalists and reviews manuscripts and federal grants on these and related topics.

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Dr. Mancik places a strong emphasis on creating and sustaining researcher-practitioner partnerships, is an advocate for evidence-based policy, and aims to strengthen these connections whenever possible. She is a plank member of the Bureau Consortium, victim researcher with the Center for Victim Research, and research member of the Criminal Investigation Research Network out of Pontypridd, Wales, all entities that facilitate researcher-practitioner partnerships in her areas of expertise.

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She has experience working in several criminal justice agencies, including with a Superior Court Judge and investigators in the District Attorney’s Office in the Western Judicial Circuit in Athens, Georgia. From 2015 to 2018 she served as an Honor Intern for the FBI, initially working at Headquarters in the Office of Partner Engagement’s Violence Prevention Section/Active Shooter Unit, where she contributed to follow-up studies from the FBI’s seminal research on active shooter incidents and worked with the Department of Education and law enforcement executives on best practices for violence prevention in K-12 schools. In 2016, she transferred to the Wilmington, Delaware Resident Agency, providing analytical and investigative support to the Safe Streets/Violent Crimes Task Force.

 

She previously worked as a researcher at the Center for Homicide Research in Minneapolis, Minnesota and the Center for Drug and Health Studies at the University of Delaware. Since moving to South Carolina, she has worked in a research advisory capacity with the Richland County Sheriff’s Department and the South Carolina Domestic Violence Advisory Committee and has forged relationships with several other federal, state, and local agencies and organizations in the area.

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Dr. Mancik’s scholarship and teaching are largely informed by her experiences working alongside community partners and criminal justice agencies. As a result, her research currently focuses on how methodological considerations, particularly measurement and conceptualization, of key constructs contribute to disparate empirical findings and the associated policy implications.

 

Her research has been published in peer-reviewed journals, including the Annual Review of Criminology, Journal of Interpersonal Violence, and Homicide Studies, as well as white papers and book chapters. Her master’s thesis, “Community Context and Homicide Clearance Rates: Estimating the Effects of Collective Efficacy,” won the prestigious Richard Block Award for Outstanding Thesis Research. She is co-editor of the forthcoming book, Taking Stock of Homicide: Trends, Emerging Themes, and Research Challenges and regularly presents research findings at national and international conferences and invited workshops.

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Dr. Mancik serves as the faculty advisor for the University of South Carolina chapter of Alpha Phi Sigma, the national criminal justice honor society, and coordinates the Department’s annual Internship/Career Fair. She also supervises graduate and undergraduate research, and regularly returns to UGA to participate in the Criminal Justice Program’s alumni panel.