Nate Link, associate professor, is a criminologist and directs of the master’s program in criminal justice. He is also affiliated with the Ph.D program in Prevention Science and the Health Sciences Center. He conducts publicly-engaged scholarship, aiming to create knowledge that can improve both public policy and the lives of those in contact with the justice system. Link primarily researches issues in corrections and sentencing, including financial sanctions and debt, prisoner reentry and desistance from crime, mental/physical health, and crime/recidivism control strategies. 

Link’s research has been supported with grants from The National Institute of Justice, Arnold Ventures, The William T. Grant Foundation, the Drug Enforcement and Policy Center at Moritz College of Law, and the South Jersey Institute for Population Health. He is currently working on a number of funded projects, including a longitudinal evaluation of cannabis legalization and decriminalization in New Jersey, and projects aimed at assessing the impact of reforming court fees and fines and other system-related debt in Philadelphia.

Link’s work appears in a variety of refereed social science and legal outlets, including: Criminology; Justice Quarterly; Social Science & Medicine; Criminal Justice and Behavior; Journal of Developmental and Life-Course Criminology; Journal of Experimental Criminology; Journal of Offender Rehabilitation; UCLA Criminal Justice Law Review; Ohio State Journal of Criminal Law; and Health & Justice.

In 2018, the Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences recognized one of his articles with the Donal MacNamara Award for “outstanding journal publication.” He was honored with a 2021 Chancellor’s Award for Outstanding Research and a 2023 Chancellor’s Award for Community-Engaged Scholarship. He also received a Board of Trustees Research Fellowship for Scholarly Excellence Award in 2023. In 2025 Link was appointed to serve a four-year term on the New Jersey Advisory Committee to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. 

At the undergraduate level, he teaches the senior seminar course—Ethics and Policy in Criminal Justice—in addition to an engaged civic learning (ECL) course he designed called Mass Incarceration, Reentry, and Justice. At the graduate level he teaches Policy Analysis in Criminal Justice and he advises and mentors many students pursuing their masters and doctoral degrees.