Gavin Slade is an associate professor in sociology. He completed a PhD in criminology from the University of Oxford and has previously held positions at the University of Toronto, Freie Universitat, Berlin and the University of Glasgow. He works on questions of criminal justice reform in the former Soviet Union with a focus on prisons, policing and organized crime. His most recently completed project, funded by the German Research Foundation and the European Commission, involved a comparative case study of how penal reform produces violence and contention in post-Soviet prison systems, comparing Georgia, Moldova, Lithuania and Kyrgyzstan. Slade is a Principal Investigator on a new project running from 2018-2021, funded by the Economic and Social Research Council in the UK, and entitled ‘In the Gulag’s Shadow: Producing, Consuming and Perceiving Prisons in the Former Soviet Union.’ The project applies criminological theory to show how the practice of incarceration is being reconstituted by social, economic, cultural and political processes in Russia and Kazakhstan. Slade has also done work for the Council of Europe, Open Society Foundation as well as the European Union’s project ‘Enhancing Criminal Justice in Kazakhstan.’