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 Director of Human Systems Institute in Boulder; 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  |  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.

William A. Dieterich, PhD  |  Director of Research

Current Research Director at Northpointe, Dr. 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 group-randomized trial assessing the effects of a prevention curriculum on aggression and substance use among elementary school students in 28 Denver public schools 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 and the Shelby County Jail classification study. Dr. Dieterich has expertise in prognostic modeling, sampling design, data collection, and psychometrics. He has broad experien ce designing and implementing COMPAS pilot studies conducted for prison, parole, and probation agencies.

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 JPMorgan/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.

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.

Beate Ehret, PhD  |  Research Analyst

Beate Ehret, Ph.D., is a researcher and analyst at Northpointe. She has over 10 years of research experience in criminology from the University of Bremen’s Special Collaborative Research Center on Life Course Dynamics and the Institute of Behavioral Science at the University of Colorado, Boulder. Her research has focused on both the causes and correlates of delinquency and the effectiveness of interventions or programs aimed at delinquency prevention or control. Several of her publications and research associate positions have specifically addressed the effects of juvenile justice system processing and formal interventions on the development of juvenile delinquency in Germany and the US. Former research projects also include examining the effects of occupational skill levels and career opportunities on the development of juvenile delinquency in Germany and the US, as well as gender research on career dynamics and labor market disparities in Germany. Beate Ehret earned her Master’s degre e in Sociology and her Ph. D in Criminology at the University of Bremen, Germany.

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.

Laura Morris, MPA  |  Consultant

Laura Morris is a consultant with Northpointe Institute for Public Management. Ms. 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.

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.

Nick Talantis  |  Quality Assurance Specialist

Nick Talantis has been with Northpointe Institute for Public Management since 1996. Nick started at Northpointe providing the day-to-day office operations. Over the years Nick has branched out developed 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.