How to Find PhD Supervisors in Criminology and Criminal Justice (and Get Funded)

Before you can email a criminology professor, you have to find the department they actually sit in, and that's less obvious in this field than in most others covered here. Criminology and criminal justice don't have one standard institutional home the way, say, chemistry does. Some universities run a dedicated criminology or criminal justice department that grants its own PhD. Others house criminology inside sociology, as a track or concentration rather than a separate degree. Others combine the two into a single "criminal justice and criminology" department, which research on where the field is actually located found to be the most common arrangement, more common than a sociology-housed program. The funding picture has a similarly real wrinkle: the field's main federal grant-maker, the National Institute of Justice, runs two differently named programs with different citizenship rules, and mixing them up is an easy way to rule yourself out of funding you'd actually qualify for, or to assume funding you don't.

Figure out where the department actually lives before you search faculty lists

Searching a university's sociology faculty page alone can mean missing an entire separate criminal justice department, and vice versa. Studies of how US institutions structure the field have found criminology most often sits in a combined criminal justice and criminology department, not inside sociology, and a number of schools have deliberately split criminal justice out from sociology into its own department over the past couple of decades, partly so the program can be ranked separately in US News's doctoral rankings rather than folded into a sociology ranking. That doesn't mean sociology-housed criminology programs have disappeared; plenty of strong crime researchers still hold sociology appointments, and some criminology doctorates are still awarded through a sociology department with a criminology concentration. The practical consequence: check a target university's own org chart directly; a "no criminology PhD" read off a sociology department's page alone can simply mean the program sits one building over, under a different department name.

The NIJ Graduate Research Fellowship isn't citizenship-restricted, unlike equivalent fellowships in several other fields

This is the field's most genuinely distinguishing funding fact, and it cuts the opposite way from several other fields on this site. In nuclear engineering and other DOE- and NASA-adjacent fields, the flagship federal graduate fellowship explicitly requires US citizenship or permanent residency, full stop. The National Institute of Justice's Graduate Research Fellowship (GRF) works differently: the accredited US academic institution applies on the student's behalf, not the individual student, and NIJ's own FY25 program materials describe eligibility around full-time doctoral enrollment and a dissertation topic relevant to US criminal or juvenile justice practice or policy, not citizenship. We did not find a citizenship or permanent residency requirement stated anywhere in NIJ's published FY25 GRF materials, which funds up to $60,000 a year for up to three years of dissertation research. That's a meaningfully different setup from the citizenship-gated model that dominates funding in fields like nuclear or aerospace engineering, and worth knowing before you assume, as an international applicant, that the field's main named fellowship is closed to you by default. Confirm the current fiscal year's eligibility language directly on NIJ's funding page before relying on this, since a solicitation's terms can shift between cycles.

Don't confuse the GRF with NIJ's separate, citizenship-restricted Research Assistantship Program

NIJ also runs a Research Assistantship Program, a differently structured opportunity that's easy to conflate with the GRF because the names and the funding agency overlap. At least one university fellowship office describes that program as open specifically to US citizens and permanent residents, across any academic discipline whose research connects to criminal justice, not limited to criminology doctoral students the way the GRF is. If you're an international applicant, the distinction matters directly: the GRF, as described above, appears open to you; the Research Assistantship Program, as described, is not. Read the eligibility section of whichever specific NIJ opportunity you're looking at rather than assuming either program's rules apply to the other because both carry the NIJ name.

Most US programs fund students through standard assistantships, not grant-dependent lab funding

Outside the GRF, the typical US criminology or criminal justice PhD is funded the way most social-science doctorates are: a departmental graduate or teaching assistantship carrying a stipend plus a full or partial tuition waiver, usually tied to around 20 hours a week of teaching or research support, rather than riding on one professor's active external grant the way lab-science PhDs often do. Reported stipend figures we found ranged roughly from $18,000 a year (Georgia State) up to around $25,000 to $27,000 (Indiana University of Pennsylvania; University of South Florida, where figures varied by source and year), and some programs state plainly that continued funding is contingent on the department's own funding each year rather than guaranteed for the full program length. What we could not confirm consistently is whether international applicants sit on the identical assistantship terms as domestic students at every one of these programs; several program pages simply don't address it either way. That's a real gap in what's publicly documented, not something we're going to paper over with an invented universal answer, ask the specific department directly rather than assuming either outcome.

In the UK, criminology funding runs through ESRC's regional doctoral training partnerships

Because UK criminology sits inside the social sciences for research-council purposes, the relevant funding mechanism is the Economic and Social Research Council's (ESRC) network of regional Doctoral Training Partnerships (DTPs), several of which run a specific law-and-criminology or social-science pathway. Some are genuinely open to international applicants and cover the UK/international fee gap when awarded, Swansea's Wales DTP (WGSSS) criminology studentships are one example. Others state an international quota up front: Oxford's Centre for Criminology notes that only around 30% of its awards through the Grand Union DTP can go to international students, which caps the number of international nominations regardless of how strong an individual application is. If you're applying to a UK program, find out which specific DTP (if any) funds that department's criminology PhDs, and ask about that DTP's current international quota and fee-gap policy directly, rather than assuming ESRC funding works identically at every UK university.

What this means for actually finding a supervisor

Put together, the practical search order looks like this: identify which department (criminology, criminal justice, a combined department, or sociology) actually houses doctoral supervision at each target university, rather than assuming one naming convention; read faculty members' recent publications to find two or three whose current research genuinely overlaps with your intended dissertation direction; and check separately whether a professor's funding comes from their own active grant, a departmental assistantship pool, or neither, before assuming any specific named fellowship like the GRF applies to a particular advisor's group. Because much of this field's funding runs through the department rather than through a single professor's grant, identifying active, publishing faculty in the right department is usually the higher-leverage task than trying to confirm one professor's personal funding line before you've even made contact.

That identification step is what GradScoutFunding is built for: it searches professors by field and country, confirms they're actively publishing, and drafts a personalized first email grounded in a professor's real recent paper for you to review and send yourself, it never sends anything automatically. It can tell you a professor is active and publishing in criminology or criminal justice, not whether a specific department's assistantship pool or a GRF-funded slot is open to you, that call sits with the department and, where relevant, with NIJ. The free tier gives 100 credits with no card required, and paid credit packs are one-time purchases that never expire.

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