Team

Prof. Sandeep Gopalan, Act. Vice President for Research, is the Principal Investigator for the “Facial Recognition and AI tools in Criminal Justice – Building Accountability and Trust” project. His team will be conducting research on the use of facial recognition under the Police Accountability, Community and Transparency Grant program.

Prof Gopalan has served in leadership roles in universities in the US, UK, Ireland, and Australia. He has also served on several Boards including the Maryland Economic Development Commission, the Arizona Aerospace and Defense Commission, and the American Bar Association Commission on Immigration.

Gopalan was educated at the National Law School of India, and Oxford University, where he was a Rhodes Scholar.

As a researcher, he has worked on areas including the regulation of new technologies, corporate and commercial law, sanctions, and international law. His legal academic research has been published in journals including at Georgetown, Vanderbilt, Northwestern, Buffalo, University of Pennsylvania, Cardozo, etc., whereas business research has been published in journals including the European Accounting Review.

Gopalan is also a widely published media columnist and his work has appeared in print and television media in many places including the US, the EU, Ireland, Australia, India, Singapore, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Dubai, etc. It has been published in outlets such as the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, The Hill, Al Jazeera, the Irish Times, the Khaleej Times, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, etc.

Email: sgopalan@umes.edu

Dr. Lily Chi-Fang Tsai is the Co-Principal Investigator for the Facial Recognition and AI tools in Criminal Justice – Building Accountability and Trust project. She is a Professor in the Department of Criminal Justice.

Tsai has multidisciplinary education background, earned her Ph.D degree in Criminal Justice, Masters of Sciences in Geographic Information System Management, Masters of Art in Criminology, and Bachelors in Law. She was educated both in the United States and in Taiwan.

As a researcher, Tsai’s research focus is interdisciplinary and employs qualitative, quantitative, or mixed methods. Tsai’s research has been published in journals, topics including public satisfaction with police, job stress and coping mechanisms among police officers, and perceptions of campus safety. She has also conducted and published empirical legal research on topics including corporate crimes and white-collar offenders, and medical care in the U.S. Prisons and civil liability actions.

Email: ltsai@umes.edu

Qian Leng serves as the Data Analyst for the “Facial Recognition and AI Tools in Criminal Justice – Building Accountability and Trust” project, focusing on her research passion for the application of facial recognition technology in the law enforcement industry.

With a diverse educational background, Leng holds a Data Science Master’s degree from Georgetown University and a bachelor’s degree in economics from China. Her multidisciplinary background enables her to approach research from various angles, a quality that is evident in her work on this law-related project.

Leng is honored to be a part of Dr. Gopalan’s research team, which offers her the opportunity to delve further into the application of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) models in facial recognition and Natural Language Processing (NLP) in policy analysis.

Email: qleng@umes.edu