Biography
Dr. Huff-Corzine, or more informally known as Dr. Lin, is a Emeritus Professor in the Department of Sociology. Lin earned her Ph.D. in Sociology at Washington University in St. Louis with criminology, social psychology, gender, and complex organizations as areas of emphasis. Her B.A. is from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, where she graduated Phi Beta Kappa with majors in Sociology and Women’s Studies while also working part-time as a private duty nurse and raising two beautiful children with her spouse. Before that, Lin earned a Diploma in Nursing from Blessing Hospital in Quincy, Illinois, and began her career as a charge nurse on a surgical unit. She then moved into psychiatric nursing with a specialty in alcohol counseling, positions that led to an appointment as Head Nurse of a 50-bed closed acute care psychiatric unit in the St. Louis area.
Lin spent the first nine years of her academic career at Kansas State University, where she obtained tenure and promotion to Associate Professor. At K-State, under Dr. Lin’s leadership, the enrollment in Criminology, located in Sociology, grew from 27 to well over 300 majors. During those years, Dr. Huff-Corzine also joined the Ethnic Studies faculty and served on the Women’s Studies Governing Board, a group of three faculty who set policy for the major and reported directly to the provost. Dr. Huff-Corzine moved to UCF in 1996, and into an Assistant Vice President position in Academic Affairs in 1999 after spending one year as a faculty fellow in the Provost’s Office and served on the provost’s staff for the next 12 years.
Dr. Lin’s research focuses on violent crime with articles published on topics such as mass murder, the effects of drug transportation routes on homicide and robbery, firearm lethality, risk factors associated with assaults on police officers, the spatial distribution of sexual assaults, and the impact of medical resources on lethal violence rates in cities. More recently, she has begun publishing on human trafficking and has pieces appearing in places such as the 2017 book, Human Trafficking, and Police Practice and Research. Dr. Huff-Corzine has also enjoyed trips to Pattaya, Thailand; Vienna, Austria; and Belgrade, Serbia, as well as to regional and national conferences in the U.S. to make presentations.
Professor Huff-Corzine’s interest in finding ways to understand and reduce lethal violence continues since her undergraduate days. From her first publications examining lynching and the influence of racism on homicide rates, she continues to explore the effects of inequalities on violence. She was chosen to participate in a workshop on mass shootings held at George Mason University in 2019, which led to the article “The Devil’s in the Details: Measuring Mass Violence,” one of the papers used to brief Congress on mass shootings during the late spring 2019. At their request, Lin prepared a literature review article for the National Institute of Justice (NIJ) that focuses on possible links between domestic violence and mass shootings. This work was used by NIJ staff as a reference for their Congressional Briefing held in the spring of 2021.
Professor Huff-Corzine currently serves the discipline as an active participant in the Homicide Research Working Group and the American Society of Criminology. She serves as a peer reviewer for over 15 academic journals. She is also an active member of the Southern Sociological Society and the Mid-South Sociological Association. She also recently joined the Florida Sheriff’s Association. Lin was a participant in the first Summit on Mass Casualty Shootings held at the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center in Glynco, Georgia, and the Serial Murder conference that the Federal Bureau of Investigation held to bring together 144 researchers from around the world to gain a better understanding of serial murderers.
Lin has served the community as a member of a 2007 Orlando task force on violence and was one of two UCF faculty to serve on the Orange County Sheriff’s 2016 taskforce on violent crime. She also works, as needed, with the Florida and United Abolitionist and the Metropolitan Bureau of Investigation. Lin also spends time in her role as a Board Member for the UCF Human Trafficking Center.
Studies published earlier in her career, as well as her dissertation, examined foodways and body weight satisfaction from a structural symbolic interactionist perspective. This work produced several articles that appeared in top academic foodways journals, such as The Ecology of Food and Nutrition and Appetite. Recently, along with two graduate students and one undergraduate student, Lin worked with Dr. Yingru Li on the study of food sources around elementary schools.
Lin has co-authored, The Currents of Lethal Violence, a monograph on homicide and suicide, and has published in numerous journals, including, Criminology, Homicide Studies, Violence and Victims, Justice Quarterly, Victims and Offenders, the Journal of Child Sexual Assault, Deviant Behavior, the Journal of Research on Crime and Delinquency, Justice Research and Policy, Journal of Contemporary Criminal Justice and Criminology and Public Policy.
In addition to publishing academic articles, some of Dr. Lin’s most rewarding work focuses on social problems occurring in the broader community, such as human trafficking, domestic violence, and violent crime trends. She currently serves as a Board Member for the UCF Human Trafficking Center, has examined violent crime trends for Orlando Police Department and periodically advises the Orange County Florida Sheriff’s Office.
Dr. Lin works closely with graduate students. She has graduated 9 Ph.D.s during the last five years as well as serving on four others as a committee member. She has also chaired 16 M.A. graduate committees during the past five years and served on five others as a member. Her philosophy is one that encourages students to find topics that they are passionate about, ones where they think they may be able to make a positive difference. Then, she works with them to find answers to their questions.
Lin spent her early years in a very rural, generally poverty-stricken part of downstate Illinois, an area that she often referred to, even when she lived there, as “nowhere.” You could go up on the barn roof and see for miles of farmland – no houses or roads within sight. Graduation from high school was followed by nursing school and later by a college education as a non-traditional student. She has been married to her spouse, Jay, longer than you need to know. Lin has two children, eight grandchildren, and five great-grandchildren. In her free time, she enjoys spending time with Jay, her family, and various students she has worked with through the years. Also, she enjoys swimming, reading, attending country concerts, and the company of her beloved Maggie Mae, AliRae, and Bo, a golden doodle, a ridgeback/lab mix, and a chocolate lab, respectively.
Research Interests
- Criminology – including, but not limited to homicide, mass murder, human trafficking, domestic & intimate partner violence
- Race, Gender, and Class as they relate to Crime and treatment by the Criminal Justice System
- Foodways & Food Inequities
