Rachel E. Lovell

Rachel Lovell, PhD, is an Assistant Professor of Criminology at Cleveland State University. She is an applied criminologist and methodologist whose research focuses on gender-based violence and victimization, particularly sexual assault, human trafficking, and intimate partner violence. Since 2015, Dr. Lovell has led several large action research projects on untested sexual assault kits in collaboration with the Cuyahoga County Prosecutor’s Office and the Akron Police Department, with funding provided by the Bureau of Justice Assistance's Sexual Assault Kit Initiative. As an extension of the Sexual Assault Kit Initiative, she serves as the lead researcher on the Cuyahoga County Prosecutor’s Office Lawfully “Owed” DNA initiative. She is also the Principal Investigator on a National Institute of Justice grant to employ natural language processing to analyze the narratives of thousands of sexual assault police reports for "signaling" language regarding a victim's credibility.