Dr. Alex Heckert, professor of Sociology, is the associate director of MARTI and lead person in MARTI training activities. He has been a research fellow at MARTI since 1998. As director of training, Dr. Heckert will work with Crystal Deemer to continue offering the very popular Summer School Conference, which was conceived and started by Dr. Robert Ackerman over 20 years ago. The Summer School Conference will be cosponsored by the Administration and Leadership Research and Training Center, which is based in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, directed by Dr. John Anderson, and affiliated with the Ph.D. program in Administration and Leadership Studies, housed in the College of Humanities and Social Sciences.
Dr. Heckert will continue his scholarship on a variety of issues, such as intimate partner violence, deviance and crime theory, disabilities studies, public guardianship, and family sociology. His is coauthor of over 40 peer-reviewed articles in leading journals, book chapters, and encyclopedia articles as well as numerous presentations at national and international conferences. Previous funded research has included predicting levels of abuse and reassault among batterers, evaluating an inclusion program for children with disabilities in daycare settings, and an NSF instrumentation grant, among other projects.