Dave Kirk is a professor in the Department of Criminology and a research associate of the Population Studies Center at the University of Pennsylvania. Kirk’s research agenda is organized around three inter-related themes: the causes and consequences of cynicism and distrust of the police and the law, solutions to criminal recidivism, and the causes and consequences of gun violence.

His book Home Free uses Hurricane Katrina as a natural experiment to investigate why so many released prisoners are subsequently rearrested and reincarcerated. One answer is related to place. The hurricane provided a unique opportunity to investigate what happens when individuals move not just a short distance away from home but to entirely different cities, counties, and social worlds.

Another project, the Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods, is an ongoing multicohort study of individuals that began in the mid-1990s, with the most recent data collection completed in 2021. It unites the longitudinal study of individual lives with social context, especially neighborhoods, families, schools, peers, and the criminal justice system. A contemporary focus is to examine the correlates and consequences of gun violence over the life course over the past quarter century, a period of dramatic social change in the United States.

He received his doctoral degree in sociology from the University of Chicago and has previously served on the faculties of the University of Oxford, the University of Texas at Austin, and the University of Maryland.