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Associate Professor, Criminology & Sociology Phone 816-501-3793 Email kristopher.proctor

K. Ryan Proctor is a criminologist and sociologist whose research focuses on developing a transdisciplinary criminology. Unlike other scientific fields, which actively work to integrate knowledge from other scientific disciplines to arrive at more powerful explanations of phenomena, criminology and sociology have largely insulated themselves from other disciplines, particularly psychology and the biological sciences. K. Ryan Proctor’s current scholarship adopts a mechanistic approach to actively integrate biological, psychological, and sociological insights to arrive at more robust theories of criminal behavior.

K. Ryan Proctor earned his baccalaureate degree in sociology at the University of Washington, minoring in society and justice and history. He went on to earn his master’s and doctorate degrees in sociology from the University of California at Riverside, specializing in criminology and sociological theory. He continued his education as a postdoctoral fellow at the Stanford University School of Education.

Over the years, K. Ryan Proctor has engaged in diverse research pertaining to health, inequality, and criminology. His research has appeared in Social Forces, Journal of Men’s Studies, Journal of Higher Education, Review of Higher Education, Sociological Forum, Journal of Criminal Justice, and the American Journal of Physical Anthropology. His recent book, Mechanistic Criminology, was published in 2019. His interest in these three disparate areas is driven by a desire to understand how the mechanisms underlying social structures constrain and enable human behavior.

K. Ryan Proctor is currently an associate professor of criminology and sociology in Avila University’s Department of Criminology and Justice Studies.