Elia Del Carmen

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Elia Del Carmen Solano-Patricio, B.Sc. is an experienced paralegal and Ph.D. student in Criminal Justice at John Jay College. 

Elia has supported research for law firms, think tanks, and university-affiliated research centers. She has collaborated on peer-reviewed publications as well as high-impact policy reports, fact sheets, and white papers submitted as legislative exhibits. Her methodological skills include data analysis, policy analysis, qualitative research and fieldwork. She has experience across diverse legal areas, with skills including legal research, real-time translation, judicial filings, and project management. A graduate research fellow, Elia’s research is transnational, interdisciplinary, and policy-oriented. 

Before college, Elia worked for small and large, multifaceted law firms. She started SOLANO MULTISERVICES in her home state of Nevada and has a demonstrated history of providing legal services in civil litigation, criminal defense, estate planning, probate, business, tax, immigration, and family law. 

She earned a B.Sc. in Urban Studies, a minor in Criminal Justice, and the one-of-a-kind Brookings Public Policy Minor from the University of Nevada-Las Vegas. She's currently a PhD student in the Criminal Justice Doctoral Program at John Jay College of Criminal Justice and travels back and forth between Nevada and New York. 

During her undergraduate years, Elia was a research assistant at Brookings Mountain West and The Lincy Institute, a public policy think tank collaboration where she authored and co-authored over two dozen publications downloaded locally and all over the world. Her contributions can be found through the Data Hub, a university repository that provides web-based access to timely data and information related to the Las Vegas metropolitan statistical area, the State of Nevada, the Mountain West region, and beyond. 

Elia graduated as a McNair Scholar, a Gilman recipient, and was awarded several institutional awards, including the Kris Drass Undergraduate Research Award in Criminal Justice. She co-authored a peer-reviewed journal article published in the International Journal of Prisoner Health and has written opinion-editorials on issues of criminal justice and public health. 

Working alongside scholars, practitioners, policymakers, stakeholders, and students, Elia has supported diverse research labs and presented at numerous national and international conferences in various disciplines including criminology, criminal justice, political science, higher education, and urban affairs. Her first research lab position was as a canvasser, surveying neighborhoods on police surveillance technology. After that, she trained alongside court practitioners and community providers on the implementation of gender-responsive Risk-Needs Assessment tools. During a program in which she supported graduate-level dissertation research, Elia learned how to conduct qualitative content analysis of domestic/intimate partner violence service provider literature. Then, at the onset of the pandemic, she worked on a geospatial analysis of the impact of COVID-19 on the incarcerated. She also interviewed dozens of leaders in government, business, and the nonprofit sector and co-hosted a podcast about their experience in Nevada. 

As a research intern in the foreign policy program at The Brookings Institution, Elia tracked policy impact by entering data on events, citations, publications, blog posts, articles, policy reports, and interviews. She wrote distribution summaries of blog posts and events on topics such as U.S.-Mexico relations, security challenges in Somalia, zoonotic diseases, and illicit wildlife trafficking. She collaborated to produce bulleted research briefings, such as on right-wing armed groups in the U.S., European Union law on pandemics, and the impact of COVID-19 on the world’s most vulnerable economies. She created photo presentations, such as for a United Nations lecture on the nexus between antiquities trafficking and terrorism. Taking notes during various international events, Elia participated in contemporary and emergent discussions on topics including conservation and national security in the U.S., police reform in Latin America, peacekeeping in Colombia, and governance challenges surrounding the coronavirus crisis in Africa. 

Elia’s latest work includes supporting research on gun violence reduction initiatives in New York State with John Jay’s Research and Evaluation Center. She also works for The Corrections Lab at John Jay, where she works with evaluators, practitioners, and implementation science professionals on applied research in community corrections.