Dr. Cynthia Calkins Mercado is an Assistant Professor of Psychology at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York, NY. She received a Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology and a Masters of Legal Studies (MLS) from the University of Nebraska's Law-Psychology program. She completed an APA accredited predoctoral internship at the Louis de la Parte Florida Mental Health Institute in Tampa, FL, while there having collaborated with members of the Department of Mental Health, Law, and Policy. After completing her doctoral work, she took a postdoctoral position in Melbourne, Australia where she taught courses in forensic psychology at Monash University while continuing her research in the area of sexual offending. While there she was also involved in the assessment and treatment of sexual and general offender populations at Forensicare, the Victorian State Forensic Mental Health Service.
Her most recent work focuses broadly on sex offenders, risk assessment, and the law. She is currently involved in research that examines sex offender treatment, civil commitment, and risk of recidivism in New Jersey. She is also collecting empirical and geo-spatial data that examines the overall impact and utility of sex offender residency restrictions and community notification statutes.
Dr. Mercado is also involved with a team of researchers at John Jay who are investigating the causes and contexts of sexual abuse in the Catholic Church. She is currently working to develop the clinical segment of this project, which will involve careful investigation of the psychological characteristics of clergy offenders.
Dr. Mercado was recently invited to give a talk on Avances en Psicología Forense at la Pontificia Universidad Javeriana in Cali, Colombia. She has done volunteer work in Bolivia and remains interested in collaborative research opportunities with Latin American scholars.
