Maria Valdovinos

Maria Valdovinos

Maria Valdovinos

Graduate Lecturer

Policing, Corrections, Prisoner Reentry, Safety, Health, and Wellness in the Criminal Legal System, Evidence-Based Crime Policy

Maria Valdovinos Olson is a doctoral candidate in public sociology at George Mason University and a research affiliate with the Movement Engaged Research Hub at the Center for Social Science Research. Her research is focused on issues of safety, health, and wellness in policing, corrections, and prisoner reentry. Maria’s dissertation addresses the question of how existing and envisioned institutions, systems, and policies can best organize the provision of care for the incarcerated/formerly incarcerated with a focus on the extremely consequential period between pre-release, entry into community corrections, and eventual release into the community. This dissertation research is supported by the National Science Foundation (via Arizona State University) Law and Science Dissertation Grant and the American Society of Criminology, Division on Corrections and Sentencing Dissertation Scholarship. Maria is also currently a co-PI on a National Institute of Justice funded project investigating the correlates of organizational stress on health and wellness outcomes among police and corrections officers.

Recent work has been published in Women & Criminal Justice, Policing: An International Journal of Police Strategies & Management and the Journal of Offender Rehabilitation. From 2017-2020, Maria was a feature writer for The Sociologist, a District of Columbia Sociological Society Publication.

Maria received the 2017 Outstanding Sociology Graduate Student Award from the Mason Department of Sociology and Anthropology (SOAN). She has also been recognized as a Stanford Lyman Scholar (Mid-South Sociological Association, 2018), Provost and SOAN Research Fellow (Mason, 2018 & 2019), Ruth D. Peterson Fellow (American Society of Criminology, 2021), and Dean’s Challenge Scholar (Mason, 2021). 

Grants and Fellowships

Maria's research has been supported by the National Science Foundation, National Institute of Justice, American Society of Criminology, Mid-South Sociological Association, and George Mason University.

Courses Taught

Sociology 301: Criminology

Education

M.A. Sociology, George Mason University

B.A. Anthropology, Northwestern University