Dave Wells | President & Chief Executive Officer

In over 30 years of professional experience in various criminal justice and community corrections capacities, Mr. Wells has managed prison work release programs, conducted case supervision, and managed a multi-county community corrections agency. In addition, he has conducted county jail population profile studies, criminal justice system analyses and community corrections master plans for numerous agencies. He has provided inmate classification training to over 350 jails nationwide and risk and needs assessment training to over 125 probation, parole and community corrections agencies. Mr. Wells is the key developer and designer of the nationally recognized JICS Decision Tree objective inmate classification system, taught at the National Institute of Corrections, Jails Division. He is also a co-developer of Northpointe’s COMPAS Risk and Needs Assessment system. He has been a consultant and presenter for numerous conferences and workshops on implementation, policy and procedure development , and data applications for jails, community corrections programs, data collection systems and analysis, and system evaluation. Mr. Wells is also co-author of several published articles and documents on community corrections, inmate classification, automated MIS systems design, and data driving policy in corrections.

Tim Brennan, PhD | Senior Vice President & Senior Scientist

Tim Brennan is probably best known for his book on The Social Psychology of Runaways (Co-authored with Del Elliott and Dave Huizinga) and his chapters on criminological classification in Criminal Justice Annual Reviews – Edited by Don Gottfredson and Michael Tonry. In addition to academic publications Dr. Brennan’s work has been reported in the BBC, National Public Radio, ABC-TV’s 20/20, Psychology Today, and other popular media. He consults regularly on offender classification and risk assessment for the National Institute of Corrections; and many State and Local Departments of Corrections.

His research interests are in classification and risk assessment of youth and adult offenders and technical procedures for pattern recognition and artificial intelligence. He is published widely in: criminological assessment, delinquency, jail and prison classification, youth runaway, adolescent loneliness and suicide, information technology and implementation processes in Criminal Justice. His work has been supported by grants from the National Institute of Justice, National Institute of Mental Health, National Institute of Corrections, and so on. He was elected to the Board of the North American Classification Society and chaired several national conferences on classification and assessment.

Tim Brennan received his Ph.D from Lancaster University, England in 1972. He is Vice President of Northpointe Institute for Public Management and an Associate Member of the Institute of Cognitive Science, University of Colorado.

Brian A. Mattson, PhD | Vice President & Chief Operating Officer

Brian A. Mattson is Vice President and Chief Operating Officer of Northpointe Institute for Public Management. Before coming to Northpointe, Dr. Mattson consulted with clients in child welfare, juvenile justice and adult corrections. His consultation services emphasize how systems collaborate to improve collective and individual performance.

Dr. Mattson led two public sector Departments in Jefferson County Colorado—Children, Youth & Families and Criminal Justice Planning. He has served as the Principal Investigator on two federally funded system integration efforts focused on juvenile justice and child welfare. He earned a Ph.D. in Sociology emphasizing studies in Criminology at the University of Colorado, a Master’s degree in Criminology from the University of Maryland, and a Bachelor’s degree in Criminal Justice from the University of Maryland.

Carla Newman, MBA | Vice President & Chief Administrative Officer

Carla Newman is a Vice President and Chief Administrative Officer of Northpointe Institute for Public Management. Having joined Northpointe in 2007 her present responsibilities include the oversight of the finance, human resources, project management and contract negotiation departments of the company. Carla brings an entrepreneurial background to Northpointe having spent the previous 10 years helping to build several start-up and early stage companies while focusing her efforts on the operational management of those organizations.

Dennis Schrantz | Senior Policy Analyst

Dennis Schrantz is the Senior Policy Analyst at Northpointe Institute for Public Management. With more than 30 years of experience in the criminal justice field, he is a recognized leader in reducing prison and jail populations while improving public safety. As the Senior Policy Analyst with Northpointe, Schrantz is responsible for working with state and local jurisdictions that want to improve their justice policies to improve system and individual performance and reduce corrections costs. Prior to joining Northpointe he served as deputy director of planning and community development for the Michigan Department of Corrections. During the 1990’s , he served as executive director of the state Office of Community Corrections, working with the DOC to reduce prison admission rates from 32 percent to 22 percent of all felony dispositions.

William A. Dieterich, PhD | Director of Research

Current Research Director at Northpointe, William Dieterich has over ten years experience conducting research in criminal justice and juvenile justice settings.  He has worked as a research analyst on several studies at the University of Denver, including a school-based randomized trial of a prevention curriculum and a series of observational studies examining co-occurring mental health and substance abuse problems among juvenile offenders.  He was the research analyst on numerous projects for the Colorado Division of Youth Corrections, including an evaluation of the Colorado Regimented Juvenile Training Program. He has worked as a research analyst on many outcomes studies, including the Denver Drug Court study.  He has expertise in prognostic modeling, sampling design, data collection, and psychometrics. He has broad experience designing and implementing COMPAS pilot studies conducted for prison, parole, and probation agencies. William Dieterich received his Ph.D. in Social Work at the University of Denver in 2003.

Dan Hellem | IT Director

Current IT Director at Northpointe, Dan Hellem has over 12 years experience in application architecture and software development. Dan has been with Northpointe since 2005 and is the chief software architect for original Web COMPAS and the new COMPAS Suite applications. Before coming to Northpointe Dan worked in a variety of different sectors and projects that included public education, legal services, e-tail services, telecommunications and software consulting.

Laura Morris, MPA | Training Director and Consultant

Current Director of Training Laura Morris has 10 years of experience as a consultant and trainer developing and facilitating collaborative, multi-disciplinary policy teams to address critical issues in criminal justice. Her work has primarily focused on the management of sex offenders in the community through the Center for Effective Public Policy on the Bureau of Justice Assistance’s (BJA) Center for Sex Offender Management project. Through that project, Ms. Morris provided training and technical assistance to over 95 state, local and tribal grantees awarded funds under BJA’s Collaborative Approaches to Sex Offender Management grant program. Ms. Morris earned her Master’s degree in Public Administration through the University of Colorado and her Bachelor’s degree in Human Development and Family Studies from Colorado State University.

Markus Breitenbach, PhD | Research Analyst & Software Developer

Markus Breitenbach is a Research Analyst at Northpointe Institute for Public Management. Before coming to Northpointe, Dr. Breitenbach worked as a Research Assistant at the University of Colorado and studied methods for clustering collections of images. He has a background in pattern recognition, has worked on various OCR, information retrieval and document management projects. He earned a Ph.D. in Computer Science emphasizing Machine Learning techniques at the University of Colorado.

Neal S. Goodloe, Jr. | Consultant and Trainer

Neal Goodloe is a consultant and trainer for Northpointe.  He has 25 years of experience as a community corrections practitioner, including five years as the chief probation officer for Virginia District 9, a position from which he retired in May 2008.  Neal was among the first chiefs in Virginia to embrace and implement an evidence-based practices model.  His efforts to improve correctional outcomes in his probation and parole office included the implementation of the COMPAS Risk/Needs Assessment tool, an experience he is ready to share with clients who may be contemplating a similar path.  Neal has over 20 years of experience as an adjunct trainer and was a founding member of the Charlottesville-Albemarle Drug Court.  He received his BA from the University of Virginia and holds a Masters degree in Public Administration from Virginia Commonwealth University.

Jed McDaniel | Software Developer and IT Engineer

Jed McDaniel has been with Northpointe since 1997. He is the lead developer and support manager for the CCAMIS product, and principle architect and developer for Northpointe's desktop version of the Youth COMPAS and Desktop JICS products. Jed has currently moved into support manager role for desktop products. Jed is a graduate of Michigan Technological University with a Bachelors degree in Computer Science.

Steven Southwell | Software Developer

Steven Southwell is a Software Developer at Northpointe Institute for Public Management. He has been with Nothpointe since October 2007. Mr. Southwell has over 10 years of software development experience in several different vertical markets. Before coming to Northpointe, he worked as a software reliability consultant and developer on embedded systems for railroad maintenance equipment. Prior to that, he developed software for the management of low income public housing and government accounting. As a result of this, Mr. Southwell has expertise in many different platforms and technologies. His 10+ years of SQL Server experience has brought new and exciting advances to new software development.

Russ Schroeder | Software Developer

Russ Schroeder is a programmer at Northpointe with over 8 years of experience. Having joined the company in 2007, Russ has extensive experience developing .NET web applications and working with SQL databases. He is also versed in several technologies, including ASP.NET, VB.NET, SQL Server 2000, Visual Source Safe, JavaScript, Nevron Charting Components, Microsoft Application Testing Center, HTML and XML.

Steve Beyer, MBA | Quality Assurance Analyst

Steve Beyer is a Quality Assurance Analyst with Northpointe Institute for Public Management. Previously, Steve worked for the last 5 years testing web-based stock brokerage sites for Brown & Company and JP Morgan/Chase in Boston. He has employed systematic software testing techniques and web performance tools to enhance the Northpointe suite of software. He earned his MBA from Central Michigan University.

Nick Talantis | Quality Assurance Specialist

Nick Talantis has been with Northpointe Institute for Public Management since 1996. Nick started at Northpointe providing support for the day-to-day office operations. Over the years Nick has grown with the company, developing new skill sets to support the growth of the company. Today, Nick’s primary responsibilities include software documentation for Northpointe’s software applications, as well as Quality Assurance, Software Testing and Verification.

Dave Colliver | Sales Manager

Dave Colliver joined Northpointe in May of 2009 and heads up our sales and marketing initiatives. Dave earned his M.B.A. in Finance and Entrepreneurship in 2004 from the University of Colorado. He comes to Northpointe with a strong background in sales having most recently been Regional and Senior Account Managers for Motorola and Gold Systems.

Ginger Anderson | Project Manager

Ginger Anderson joined Northpointe in 2004 as an Executive Assistant. Over the years she has taken on numerous new responsibilities and most recently been promoted to one of our project managers. In this regard she is principally responsible for managing our Inmate Classification, JICS and smaller client COMPAS projects.

Carrie Williams | Technical Writer

Carrie joined the company in October of 2008. Carrie is Northpointe’s principal in-house document editor - assisting all company writers with their various documents and related written project deliverables. She is also in charge of all internal desktop publishing and the preparation of our software help and technical documents.

Keri Fitzpatrick | Consultant and Trainer

Keri is the latest addition to our Northpointe team. Keri comes to us with over 20 years of experience in providing psychological, addiction and sex offender therapy services to youth and adult criminal justice populations. Keri is also a former probation officer, administrator and consultant in the areas of crisis intervention, juvenile supervision standards, domestic violence, sex offender management, etc. She has a BA in Psychology from the University of Kansas and a Masters Degree in Counseling and Guidance from the University of Nebraska.

Josh Mouch | Software Developer

Josh Mouch joined Northpointe in the Spring of 2009. With over 8 years of experience with developing applications in C# 3.0, VB.Net, XAML, XBAP, Silverlight, ASP.NET, ASP, VBScript, ADO/ADO.NET, JavaScript, Visual Basic 6, C/C++, etc, Josh is an excellent addition to the Northpointe IT team. His high school Salutatorian, Josh graduated with honors from the University of Michigan with a Bachelors in Computer Science and competed each year in the National ACM Programming Competition.

Tami Navarre | Software Development and Customer Support

Tami Navarre is a software developer at Northpointe and also provides software technical support to our clients. Tami has over 8 years of experience developing and maintaining software applications in ASP, Java Script, SQL, ASP.NET, VB.NET, HTML, etc. She has spent much of her IT career working for the Michigan House of Representatives and the State of Michigan. Tami earned her Bachelor of Science, Information Technology degree in 2004. She started with Northpointe in December 2009.

Liz Craig, MPA | Consultant

Liz Craig is a trainer and consultant in organizational change and staff development. She is a member of the Motivational Interviewing Network of Trainers (MINT, Inc), and designs and conducts training and coaching workshops in motivational interviewing, risk assessment, and evidence-based practices for all sectors of corrections, as well as for nonprofit and private human service agencies. As Training Director and Consultant at Justice System Assessment and Training in Boulder, Colorado, she designed and conducted training programs with agencies throughout the U.S. and consulted on implementation planning and program evaluation.

Through her work with innovative national demonstration projects, she facilitated on-going collaboration between public, private, and nonprofit entities in program design and implementation, developing a communication network of national leaders in criminal justice, public health, academia, and clinical healthcare.  

Ms. Craig earned her Master of Public Administration at University of Colorado, and her Bachelor of Science in Healthcare Administration at Regis University, Denver.

Tony Goggin | Software Developer

Tony Goggin joined Northpointe in May of 2010 as a software developer coming from a background of building web applications and web services using ASP and ASP.net for the education industry. He also has experience creating n-tier applications using .Net and SQL Server for desktop and mobile devices. Prior to developing web applications for educators, Tony also worked in the mapping and GIS industry as well as constructing software solutions for emergency first responder personnel. Tony started his training and career as a software professional in the United States Air Force in the mid 1980s and has been developing software since that time.

Rob Barnard | Quality Assurance Manager

Mr. Barnard has been in the IT industry for over 25 years fulfilling a range of duties including; programmer, analyst, consultant, quality assurance, and project manager.  He started his career designing, building, and programming automated test equipment for the computer industry; as well as software to monitor the health of hardware used in large clusters of engineering workstations and servers. Later he developed specialized Electrical and Mechanical CAD software for leading aerospace and industrial-HVAC engineering companies.  Other roles include programming, requirements gathering, and project management for a collaborative-CRM software startup firm which grew from 2 to over 50 developers. Robert’s focus is to understand, optimize, and document business processes in order to drive institutional quality and efficiency. Rob has received several awards as a field engineer (Prime Computer & Computervision) for outstanding customer service & satisfaction.

Valerie Clark, PhD | Research Analyst

Before coming to Northpointe, Dr. Clark worked as a Research Assistant at the Pennsylvania State University, researching the use of economic sanctions in criminal sentencing along with the Pennsylvania Commission on Sentencing. Dr. Clark has also conducted research on general violence, victimization, and intimate partner violence. She earned both her Master’s degree and Ph.D. in Crime, Law, and Justice from Penn State.