To contact any member of the research staff, click on their email link below.

Karen L. Amendola, PhD, Chief Operating Officer. Dr. Amendola has almost twenty years of experience in law enforcement testing, training, research, evaluation, technology, and assessment. Her areas of focus include culture and climate, integrity, accountability, performance, and measuring performance. She has been with the Police Foundation since 1994.

Dr. Amendola earned both her master of arts and doctor of philosophy degrees in industrial/ organizational psychology at George Mason University. She also holds a master of arts degree in human resources management from Webster University.

Formerly she served as the vice-president of training and career development at Fields Consulting Group, Inc. where she managed public safety selection, testing, and training projects emphasizing ethical and community oriented dimensions of performance. Dr. Amendola also served as president of Professional Development Associates, Inc., a training, career, and organizational development firm serving public safety agencies and other businesses.

Her publishing credits include Psychological Fitness for Duty, Evaluation of Performance; Assessing Law Enforcement Ethics; Law Enforcement Shift Schedules, Stress and Police Work; Minimizing the Risks: Personnel Selection Strategies, as well as two co-authored publications on mentoring relationships, and one on Compstat.

David Weisburd, PhD, Senior Fellow. He is professor of criminology at the Hebrew University Law School in Jerusalem and distinguished professor and director of the Center for Evidence Based Crime Policy at George Mason University. Professor Weisburd received his PhD from Yale University. He is the coauthor of several Police Foundation reports, including The Abuse of Police Authority, Compstat and Organizational Change in the Lowell Police Department: Challenges and Opportunities, and The Growth of Compstat in American Policing. Professor Weisburd chairs the foundation’s research advisory committee.

Garth den Heyer, PhD, Senior Research Fellow. Dr. den Heyer has served with the New Zealand Police for 28 years.  He is a Chief Inspector and is the Manager, Security, Counter Terrorism and Emergency Planning.  His areas of research center around operational and strategic policing and include comparative policing, police resource allocation, modeling crime, police threat and risk analysis, police use of intelligence, the law enforcement response to national and international terrorism and organized and transnational crime, police tactical squads, close protection policing, police performance measurement and service delivery effectiveness.

Dr. den Heyer has served in post-conflict nations, advising on law, justice, and policing issues and was recently the strategic advisor to the executive of Regional Mission to the Solomon Islands (RAMSI) Participating Police Forces (PPF) in relation to the organization’s performance, structure, design, and the direction of the future deployment and Mission.

Edwin E. Hamilton, MA, Professional Services Director. Mr. Hamilton received his master's in criminal justice from the George Washington University and completed doctoral studies at the University of Maryland. He has served as the statistical analyst and project director for numerous foundation projects, including Private Ownership of Firearms in the United States: A National Survey, and First-Line Supervision in the Community Policing Context. He is author of Project Exile: A Guidebook to Implementing Successful Gun-Reduction Programs, and co-author of The Metro-Dade Spouse Abuse Replication Project, The Big Six: Policing America's Largest Cities, and The Abuse of Police Authority: A National Study of Police Officers’ Attitudes. Mr. Hamilton has been with the Police Foundation since 1983.

LeRoy O’Shield, Senior Technical Assistance Advisor.  LeRoy O’Shield has over thirty years’ experience in law enforcement and is a leading expert in innovative community-police relations.  He served as chief of the Chicago Housing Authority Police and as a commander of district operations in the Chicago Police Department. He has served as a consultant and trainer on a range of police operational and administrative issues for public and private entities, including the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, the U.S. Department of Defense, and the Police Foundation.  He is also an adjunct professor in criminal justice at Governor’s State University.

Raymond Johnston, Sr., BA, Senior System Engineer. Mr. Johnston has almost 40 years of experience in software design and development, and computer engineering and programming. After 20 years with Sperry Univac, and 10 years with RCA/GE, Mr. Johnston designed and developed The RAMS™ for the Police Foundation. He has a BA in Mathematics from Lincoln University, and has done graduate work at New York University toward his master's degree in mathematics.

Kristen Koval, MA, Research & Administrative Coordinator. Ms. Koval comes to the Police Foundation from an internship with the FBI National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime, where she participated in research activities aimed at developing innovative investigative techniques for violent crime. Prior to that, she was a research assistant in the psychology department at Wheeling Jesuit University, where she completed research projects related to human psychophysiology. Ms. Koval has an MA in forensic psychology from Marymount University, and graduated magna cum laude from Wheeling Jesuit University with a BA in psychology and a minor in criminal justice. Prior to graduate school, she worked as a mental health case manager, providing advocacy, service planning, linkage/referral, assessment and crisis response planning services.