Frank Edwards is a sociologist broadly interested in social control, the welfare state, racism, and applied statistics. His research explores the causes and consequences of the social distribution of state violence. One set of projects draws attention to child protection systems as key sites of state violence and racial stratification. This work shows that American child protection systems are tightly intertwined with carceral and welfare policy systems, and that racism and settler colonialism play a central role in explaining the spatial and social distribution of family separation. A second set of projects uses novel data and methods to provide detailed statistical analyses of the prevalence and distribution of police violence in the US. He received his Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Washington in 2017, and is an Associate Professor of Criminal Justice at Rutgers University - Newark.