Alexandra Lysova

Alexandra Lysova became interested in examining crime, violence and victimization in her early teenage years in Russia when she was exposed to violence. Even though the crime rate in her home city in the Far East of Russia was already very high in the Soviet times, it increased dramatically after the collapse of the Soviet Union.  Alexandra's personal fears of crime, her search for answers to many questions about crime, and her desire to help crime victims led her to the Department of Psychology and Social Work at the Far Eastern National University. After graduating with honours, Alexandra decided to pursue an academic career and entered graduate school in sociology with the strong intention to launch one of the first studies in Russia of the scope of intimate violence and the role of experts in dealing with victims of violence. Her studies, based on police statistics and forensic psychiatry reports, showed that over a third of all homicides in Russia are committed by spouses or intimate partners.  Moreover, Alexandra's professional training in Rational Emotive Behavioural psychotherapy at the Albert Ellis Institute in New York City allowed her to observe the escalation of violent dynamics to severe violence in dating and marital couples on the individual level.

Alexandra has looked for the opportunities to examine the problem of intimate violence at both the macro and micro levels and from an international perspective. To that end, she has worked collaboratively on three cross-cultural studies on dating violence, corporal punishment, and sexual victimization, all of which helped her to explore the social, cultural and organizational roots of violence. Alexandra also has been actively involved in international communication and collaboration with leading sociologists and criminologists as a Kennan Institute scholar in Washington D.C., a Fulbright scholar at New York University, a visiting scholar through the German Chancellor Scholarship (Alexander von Humboldt Foundation) at the Max Plank Institute in Germany, and a visiting scholar through the Carnegie Research Fellowship Program at the University of New Hampshire. Alexandra holds the Medal for the Excellence in Scholarship given by the Russian Academy of Sciences. She has presented her work at international conferences and published in peer-reviewed journals in Russian, English and German.