Dr. Sellin came to prominence in the 1920s and 30s for his studies in the use of criminal statistics at local, state,s national and international levels, and later helped draft the U.S. Uniform Criminal Statistics Act in 1944.)

President of the International Society of Criminology from 1956 to 1965, secretary-general of the Bern-based International Penal and Penitentiary Commission from 1949 to 1951, he was also for nearly four decades (1929-68) editor of the noted ANNALS of the Academy of Political and Social Science. He taught at Penn from 1922 until he retired in 1967, he died in 1994 at the age of 97, full of honors from a host of nations including the honorary doctorates of Leiden, Copenhagen and Brussels as well as his graduate alma mater, Penn. The University's Sellin Center for Studies in Criminology and Criminal Law was named after him and was directed by his onetime student and collaborator, Dr. Marvin Wolfgang.

Colleague Peter Lejins described the principal aim of Dr. Sellin's career as "developing criminology as a scientific discipline," with a methodology resting on two fundamental ideas: first, a comprehensive view of the subject, which incorporated historical, sociological, psychological, and legal factors into the analysis, in addition to the development of analytical models; and second, the establishment and utilization of statistics in the evaluation of crime, an area in which Dr. Sellin was a foremost authority.

Dr. Marvin E. Wolfgang, the world-renowned criminologist, was professor of criminology, legal studies, and law at the Wharton School and founding director of the Sellin Center for Studies in Criminology and Criminal Law. He was a member of the University for 45 years, starting with his enrollment as a graduate student in 1952, when he also joined the faculty.

As a pioneer of quantitative and theoretical criminology, Dr. Wolfgang defined the boundaries of the sociology of crime.

In 1994, the British Journal of Criminology acknowledged Dr. Wolfgang as "the most influential criminologist in the English-speaking world." His research and critical commentaries appear in more than 30 books and 150 articles.

Three books count among his classic and most influential work: The Measurement of Delinquency (1964), co-authored with his mentor, Dr. Thorsten Sellin, is an authoritative analysis of the importance of criminal statistics and the development of scientifically precise methods by which the severity of crimes can be measured and studied; The Subculture of Violence (1968) is a theoretical treatise on the causes and correlates of violent behavior, which remains - over 30 years after it was published - the definitive exposition of society's responsibility for breeding violent criminal behavior; and Delinquency in a Birth Cohort (1972), with Sellin and Dr. Robert Figlio, is considered Dr. Wolfgang's greatest scholarly accomplishment. It details the juvenile careers of a group of men born in 1945. His conclusion, that a small number of chronically offending juveniles account for a disproportionate amount of crime, has influenced legislative bodies, law-reform commissions, and criminal-justice policy- makers around the world.

Until his death, he was engaged in a 10-year longitudinal study of juvenile delinquency in the People's Republic of China, based on his birth-cohort studies in Philadelphia and San Juan, P.R.Professor Wolfgang supervised more than 100 doctoral students, many of whom are now deans, chairs, and professors at universities and institutions throughout the world.

Academics and practitioners from many disciplines acknowledged his contributions by electing him president of the American Society of Criminology and to membership in the American Philosophical Society. One of the world's most cited authors in his field, he was also president of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, the associate secretary-general of the International Society of Criminology; a consultant to the President's Commission on Law Enforcement and Administration of Justice; a member of the old federal Department of Health, Education, and Welfare's Panel on Social Indicators; the director of research for the Presidential Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence; a member of the Advisory Committee on Reform of the Federal Criminal Law; and a member of the National Commission on Obscenity and Pornography. A strong opponent of the death penalty, he was gratified that his research findings were used in the landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision Furman v. Georgia (1972), which held that the death penalty, as it was then applied, was unconstitutional.A recipient of two Guggenheim Fellowships and a Fulbright Scholarship, Dr. Wolfgang received a number of awards from international criminological societies.

Joining the Penn faculty in 1952, he continued teaching until his illness in 1998, occasionally taking visiting professorships, such as those of the University of Cambridge, the State University of New York at Albany, Rutgers University, and the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.

Open-mindedness and generocity are what Jerry Lee, the Center's founder, brings to Penn by convincing fellow business leaders to support higher learning at Penn. So many of the people of Jerry's station in life are convinced that they already have all the answers. Jerry Lee is only convinced that he has a lot of questions-and not even all the questions.

Jerry wants to know what works to prevent crime. He wants to know how we can stop terrorism. He wants to know how research can be translated more effectively into action.

He wants to know more about the basic science of crime causation, like how the brain works in different social settings to repress or release an impulse to commit violence. But he also wants to know how to engineer our crime prevention systems more effectively, so that the FBI and local police agencies can share more information on criminal suspects and potential terrorists. The Jerry Lee Center aspires to reach a high standard of achievement in answering those questions.

Working with the Center for Cognitive Neurosciences and the Center for Bioethics, the Lee Center hopes to advance basic knowledge about the complex connections between social structure and biology in shaping criminal or law-abiding behavior.

Working with over twenty agencies of local, state and federal government, the Center hopes to create a criminological equivalent of the Franklin stove: an information system that pools data and makes far more efficient predictions about who is at highest risk of committing a crime, and how that risk might be reduced-through social services, family support, or law enforcement surveillance.

Working with local police agencies from around the world, the Center hopes to learn their best practices for investigating and preventing terrorist violence.

Working with victims and offenders and their families, the Lee Center hopes to find ways to bring them together, to start healing and repairing the harm done by crime.

The Jerry Lee Center hopes to do all this with an open mind as to what the answers might be, but with the most rigorous tools of science for discovering the truth about what the answers are.

But as Janet Reno, former Attorney General, said during the dedication of the Center, it is not just the research that we need to make a safer and more democratic world. It is an abiding faith in how people might use that research. We will ultimately make progress because people crave useful knowledge. It is that faith in people, and not just in research, that underlies the mission of the Jerry Lee Center of Criminology.

When the University of Pennsylvania established the Department of Criminology in 2003, Dr. Sherman invited Laurie Robinson to direct the Professional Masters Program. Robinson served as Assistant Attorney General in the U.S. Department of Justice from 1993 to 2000. She spearheaded initiatives in areas ranging from comprehensive community-based crime control to violence against women, law enforcement technology, drug abuse, and corrections. Sherman and Robinson lead the Department of Criminology in preparing students to excel in criminal justice practice and policy.