Rita Grunberg

Rita Grunberg is a Data Scientist at the Wilson Center for Science and Justice at Duke Law School, where she contributes to data-driven projects examining patterns in the criminal legal system. She manages the Wilson Center’s database on debt-based driver’s license suspensions in North Carolina and led the development of the Life Sentences Dashboard, a public resource hosting two decades of national data on life imprisonment in the United States. She is currently assisting in the development of several new databases for the Center, including a dataset that links exposure to criminal legal system to the risk of drug overdose deaths, and a dataset that joins prison and court records to understand patterns in prison sentencing.

Rita earned her PhD in Ecology and Evolution from Rutgers University and previously held a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of North Carolina. Her prior research integrated field studies, laboratory experiments, and statistical modeling to understand disease epidemics in nature.