Farewell Dominik Gerstner
From Researching Crime to Teaching the New Generation of Police Officers
One of our postdoctoral researchers, Dominik Gerstner, will be shifting his focus from basic research to application-oriented teaching. He is leaving the Max Planck Institute to take on a position as a professor at the State Police College (Hochschule für Polizei) of Baden-Württemberg. Starting in October 2023, Dominik will teach police officers who are qualifying themselves for the higher intermediate level of police enforcement service. The curriculum imparts scientific knowledge and methods as well as practical skills.
Dominik’s departure from the Institute is in keeping with the goal of the Max Planck Society to develop the professional profiles of early career researchers. A graduate of sociology and cultural anthropology, he joined the Department of Criminology as a doctoral researcher in 2010 and completed his doctorate on juvenile delinquency in 2021. Dominik went on to lead projects on spatial crime patterns and security and on life satisfaction in neighborhood settings. He also headed a project evaluating applied predictive policing technology in the federal state of Baden-Württemberg, which garnered widespread attention in the media and press.
Most notably, during the postdoc phase of his independent research, Dominik played a prominent role in the Virtual Burglary Project, which analyzes eye-tracking data and spatial data from virtual reality experiments with incarcerated burglars; some of the experiments are conducted in the Institute’s very own MAXLab. In his words, “Empirical research can be challenging. During my time at the Max PIanck Institute, I really appreciated its amazing infrastructure. I will always grateful for the possibilities offered by the Max Planck Society for further training and personal career development.”