Professor Jacqueline Katzman Honored with 2025 MacNamara Award

Dr. Jacqueline Katzman, assistant professor of psychology, received the 2025 Donal E.J. MacNamara Award, which is given annually to an instructor or assistant professor who has made a significant scholarly contribution in the preceding two years to the fields of criminal justice or criminology. 

Katzman’s research investigates racial inequality in the legal system, with an emphasis on eyewitness misidentifications. Her findings suggest that racial disparities in wrongful convictions based on eyewitness misidentifications may not be the result of memory errors on the part of the eyewitness, but rather systemic racism in policing procedures. Katzman's recent publications include “Police Decisions Involved in Collecting Eyewitness Identification Evidence,” with Professor M.B. Kovera, in The Cambridge Handbook of Psychology and Legal Decision-Making, “Phenotypic Mismatch Between Suspects and Fillers but not Phenotypic Bias Increases Eyewitness Identifications of Black Suspects” in Frontiers in Psychology and “Potential Causes of Racial Disparities in Wrongful Convictions Based on Mistaken Identifications: Own-Race Bias and Differences in Evidence-Based Suspicion” in Law and Human Behavior. 

Katzman has received several research grants, including from the National Science Foundation, the American Psychology-Law Society, the American Academy of Forensic Psychology and CUNY, and awards, including 1st place in the American Psychology-Law Society Dissertation Award Competition. She received her PhD from the CUNY Graduate Center.