Professor Henry Pontell, chair of the Department of Sociology, has been named as a Distinguished Professor, following action by the City University Board of Trustees. Pontell becomes the eighth current John Jay faculty member to hold that title.

Pontell, a noted criminologist, joined the John Jay faculty last spring as a Presidential Scholar, professor and department chair. He had previously held a variety of faculty and administrative positions at the University of California, Irvine.

Pontell’s research and teaching interests include deviance and social control, white-collar and corporate crime, financial and health-care fraud, identity theft, comparative criminology and cybercrime. He is currently conducting a comparative study of white-collar and corporate crime in China, and an examination of the mechanisms by which major financial fraud is related to global economic crises.

He has nine books and more than 100 articles and chapters to his credit, including the International Handbook of White-Collar and Corporate Crime (Springer) and Profit Without Honor: White-Collar Crime and the Looting of America (Pearson, Prentice-Hall). He is a past President of the Western Society of Criminology, a past Vice President of the American Society of Criminology, and is a Fellow of both organizations. He currently serves as President of the White Collar Crime Research Consortium of the National White Collar Crime Center.

Among Pontell’s many academic and professional accolades are the Albert J. Reiss Jr. Distinguished Scholarship Award from the American Sociological Association, the Donald R. Cressey Award from the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners, the Paul Tappan Award from the Western Society of Criminology, the Herbert Bloch Award from the American Society of Criminology, and the Gil Geis Lifetime Achievement Award from the National White Collar Crime Center.