Jeffery Todd Ulmer (born March 2, 1966) is a professor of sociology and criminology at Pennsylvania State University (Penn State). He served as the associate head of the Department of Sociology and Criminology from 2013 to 2019. Education Ulmer received his B.A. from Susquehanna University in 1988, and his M.A. and Ph.D. from Penn State in 1990 and 1993, respectively, all in sociology. He graduated from Springdale High School in Springdale, AR, in 1984. Career From 1994 to 2000, Jeffery Ulmer served on the sociology faculty of Purdue University, first as Assistant professor and later as Associate professor of sociology. In 2000, he joined the faculty of Penn State, first as Associate Professor, where he was later promoted to the rank of full Professor. In 2013, he became Associate Head of the Department of Sociology and Criminology there, serving until 2019. Perhaps Ulmer's best known and most influential research has focused on criminal court prosecution and sentencing. In the late 1990s, Darrell J. Steffensmeier, Ulmer, and John H. Kramer developed the “focal concerns” theoretical model of sentencing and criminal justice decision making, which describes criminal punishment decisions as driven by prosecutors' and judges' interpretations of defendants' "blameworthiness," assessments of defendants' "dangerousness" to the community, and perceptions of "practical constraints" surrounding criminal cases. This focal concerns perspective has become a major conceptual framework used in sentencing research, and has recently been used in a variety of studies to examine other criminal justice decision making sites as well, such as charging and plea bargaining, probation revocation, and parole decisions. In addition, Ulmer's research has been instrumental in studying how court prosecution and sentencing are influenced by courts' social and organizational contexts. Ulmer has advocated for the "court communities" theoretical perspective on criminal court organization, which depicts courts through the metaphor of communities, with their own distinctive organizational culture, norms, organizational relationships, and local influences. Ulmer's research typically combines the focal concerns perspective with the court communities view in order to study how court contexts shape judges' and prosecutors' sentencing and plea bargaining. A subtheme of Ulmer's work has been to study how U.S. state or federal sentencing policies, such as sentencing guidelines or mandatory minimums, are adapted (and circumvented) by local court prosecutors, judges, and defense attorneys. Ulmer's research often mixes quantitative and qualitative data, and draws on organizational theory in sociology. Another topic of Jeffery Ulmer's research in criminology focuses on