Ric Curtis is a Professor in the Anthropology Department at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice. He has more than twenty-five years of experience conducting ethnographic research in New York City neighborhoods. At the Vera Institute of Justice in the late 1980s, he was co-author of a study that examined the effectiveness of New York City’s Tactical Narcotics Team. During the 1990s, while at the National Development and Research Institutes, Inc. (NDRI), he participated in several large studies of injecting drug users and HIV risk networks, and conducted survey and ethnographic research on risk behaviors among young adults in a neighborhood with high rates of HIV and other sexually transmitted infections. At John Jay College, he was the Director of the “Heroin in the 21st Century” project, a five-year ethnographic study of heroin users and distributors in New York City funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA). He was also the Principal Investigator of the “Lower East Side Trafficking” project, a two-year study funded by the National Institute of Justice (NIJ), which examined the developmental trajectories and interactions between markets for different illegal drugs. In the summer of 2000, he conducted a rapid assessment of HIV/AIDS risk in Newark, New Jersey for the Surgeon General’s office. He led a team of researchers in conducting a rapid assessment of shootings and homicides in two Brooklyn police precincts for the District Attorney’s office in the summer of 2003. He is currently working on three projects: a study for the Center for Disease Control (CDC) to examine drug injector behaviors in Long Island and New York City; a study of drug dealing and violence in Rochester, New York; and a study of teenage prostitutes in New York City. Dr. Curtis serves on the Boards of Directors of several local social service organizations, including Family Services Network, The After Hours Project in Brooklyn, and CitiWide Harm Reduction in the Bronx.