Five Questions with Meagan Docherty, ASU Postdoc in the School of Criminology and Criminal Justice

1.  Tell us about yourself… 

I’m from New Jersey, northern New Jersey – lived there all my life.  I play guitar and ukulele. I’m an avid animal lover so I have two dogs, a snake and a turtle.  So when we road tripped here from New Jersey, we had two dogs in the back seat and the turtle on the floor for three days.  My snake is a King snake – he’s still pretty small.  He’s gray and orange.  He’s my cutie.

 2.  How did you end up at ASU?

In my graduate work at Rutgers, I obviously followed other people in academia whose work I admired, and one of those people was Dustin Pardini. When I saw that he posted a position for a postdoc and it was doing all of the things that I love, looking at child and adolescent development, problem behaviors and those types of things, I applied for the job.

I’m in the School of Criminology and Criminal Justice.  I got my PhD in Developmental Psychology at Rutgers, but I took a lot of CJ courses and my work had a lot of overlap with Criminal Justice issues and juvenile delinquency, so the crossover was pretty easy.    

Obviously ASU is a great school to come to.  There are a lot of resources here to support your research, and support your work.  I figured it would help me grow into the independent scientist that I want to become, and there’s just a ton of great people here in all different departments. I’m auditing a class this fall with someone in the psychology department that is teaching a kind of analysis that he is an expert in the field on and published a lot on. It’s nice to be somewhere where people are at the top of their field, and you get to learn from experts who have been doing this for a long time.

 3.  What’s the most interesting part of your work?

There are a couple of things.  Research-wise, it’s been interesting to me to learn new types of models that explain development and changes in behavior in ways I haven’t thought of before, or wasn’t able to look at before.  One interesting part of my work is getting to look at datasets that follow children from age 6 to age 30, and be able to look at things like: what are the changes that happen in childhood, in adolescence, that predict if someone’s going to offend, or carry a gun, or doing all these other kinds of behaviors? -- so that’s been very interesting. 

The other thing that has been very interesting to me is being in a lab where there’s a lot of people at various stages of their career. There’s undergrads and grad students and bachelors level research assistants, and it’s been really interesting to me to help them grow and watch them become interested in their own research topics and take on their own projects, and mentor or teach them in whatever way I can.      

 4.  So I have to ask this question, have you ever been arrested?

LOL.  No.  Pulled over, yes.  Banned temporarily from Six Flags, yes.  But never arrested. 

 5.  What’s your favorite tv show or movie? 

Ohhhh.  That’s a tough one.  Of shows that are on right now, probably Westworld.  And Game of Thrones.  I’m obsessed with those.  I’m also into psychopathy, so I watch Mindhunter on Netflix, where they go around and interview serial killers.