Two assistant professors of criminology have won a pair of $500,000 grants from the National Institute of Justice to study sex and labor trafficking. Ryan Shields is working on ways to better identify trafficking victims, while Amber Horning Ruf researches how people become pimps and sex traffickers.

Asst. Prof. Neil Shortland has won a $420,000 National Science Foundation CAREER grant to study how police, firefighters, doctors and others make critical decisions in emergencies – and whether they can learn to make better ones.

Only 18 in 100 rapes and sexual assaults on teenage girls and women reported to police result in an arrest, and fewer go to court. Three criminal justice professors found that decisions to close cases are largely based on prosecutors’ judgments about victim behavior, credibility and cooperation.