Dr. Welsh is a Visiting Professor of Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School, Professor of Criminology at Northeastern University, and the Director of the Cambridge-Somerville Youth Study (CSYS). Founded in 1935, by Richard Cabot, a renowned physician and professor of clinical medicine and social ethics at Harvard, the CSYS is a randomized controlled trial of a delinquency prevention intervention of 506 underprivileged boys from Cambridge and Somerville, Mass. Dr. Welsh recently completed the first phase of a long-term follow-up of the study, with a focus on mortality outcomes up to age 90.
Dr. Welsh is the 2021 recipient of the Academy of Experimental Criminology’s Joan McCord Award and is an elected member of the Campbell Collaboration’s Crime and Justice Coordinating Group. He received a Ph.D. in Criminology from Cambridge University.
Prevention of delinquency, crime, and violence, with a special focus on developmental, community, and situational approaches, and evidence-based social policy.
Professor Welsh has written extensively on these topics and is an author or editor of 12 books, including Saving Children from a Life of Crime: Early Risk Factors and Effective Interventions (Oxford University Press, 2007), Making Public Places Safer: Surveillance and Crime Prevention (Oxford University Press, 2009), Experimental Criminology: Prospects for Advancing Science and Public Policy (Cambridge University Press, 2013), and The Oxford Handbook of Evidence-Based Crime and Justice Policy (Oxford University Press, forthcoming). Along with Scott Podolsky and Steven Zane, he is currently working on the first of two books on the CSYS: Between Medicine and Criminology: Richard Cabot and the Making of the Cambridge-Somerville Youth Study (Oxford University Press).