Independent Ethics Advisor
Prof Manuel Eisner is Professor of Comparative and Developmental Criminology and deputy director of the Institute of Criminology, University of Cambridge, UK, where he leads the multidisciplinary Violence Research Centre and the Social Science Research Methods Programme.
Prior to that appointment, Prof Eisner was Associate Professor in Sociology at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology. He has been an advisor to the Directorate of Legal Affairs, Division of Crime Problems, of the Council of Europe (1994), an invited expert to the Legal Issues Commission of the Swiss National Council (2001), a scientific expert on the prevention of youth violence to the Swiss Federal Council, Department of Home Affairs (2008), a scientific advisor to the Crime Prevention Council of Lower Saxony (2009), and a member of the World Health Organisation's Global Violence Prevention Alliance (2012-onwards). In 2001, Prof Eisner was elected Chair of the "Right-Wing Extremism: Causes and Countermeasures" National Research Programme by the Swiss National Science Foundation. Prof Eisner has extensive experience designing and managing ethically complex research projects, including the Reducing Academic and Behavioural Problems amongst Children at Risk of School Exclusion in the Greater London Authority Project, funded by the European Commission (2013-15), and, most importantly, the $5.2 million Zurich Project on the Social Development of Children (z-proso; 2004-onwards), co-funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation and the Jacobs Foundation.
z-proso is a longitudinal study investigating the development of social skills and problem behaviour in children and adolescents, which involves the large-scale collection, handling, analysis and publication of highly sensitive data from ethnically-diverse, vulnerable populations, notably children. The project is undertaking its fourth wave of data collection, having successfully gone through review and reapplied for funding on several occasions. Based on this experience directing as well as reviewing sensitive projects in the domains of violence studies and programme evaluation on behalf of a number of research foundations, such as the UK Economic and Social Science Research Council and the US National Science Foundation, Prof Eisner has recently been speaking and writing on the ethical problem of conflict of interest in crime prevention studies.
Prof Eisner is a recipient of the prestigious Sellin-Glueck Award in Criminology and a Fellow of the Academy of Experimental Criminology.
