Paige Presler-Jur

Paige Presler-Jur is both a research scientist and a policy analyst. With a diverse academic background in public health, environmental science, and engineering, Ms. Presler-Jur works to understand the challenges and barriers that communities encounter while trying to solve problems in criminal legal and public health contexts.

Currently, Ms. Presler-Jur is focused on building bridges across disciplines to provide improved services and support to victims of sexual assault and to facilitate effective responses to illicit substance use and misuse. She is the associate project director for RTI’s Training and Technical Assistance Team (TTA) team on the Comprehensive Opioid, Stimulant, and Substance Use Program (COSSUP), helping to provide a tailored and consistent response to COSSUP grantees and to jurisdictions working to reduce overdose deaths in their communities through improving access to harm reduction, treatment, and recovery services.

Ms. Presler-Jur is also the co-principal investigator for Advancing Hospital-Based Technology to Support Victims of Interpersonal Violence, a project for the Office of Victims of Crime. In this project, RTI and MedReportGuard (MRG) are working with diverse jurisdictions across California to develop a new and expanded digital platform, the MRG Suite, to ensure that victims of all forms of interpersonal violence receive the support and services they need. She serves as the Site Engagement Lead for the Enhancing Response to Victims: A Formative Evaluation of OVC’s Law Enforcement-based Victim Services (LEV) Program where RTI and the International Association of Chiefs of Police are partnering to conduct a practitioner- and victim-informed multisite formative evaluation of the Office for Victims of Crime’s LEV program.

Ms. Presler-Jur was previously a member of the From Research to Reality: Recruiting More Women into the Policing Profession team. It is a National Institute of Justice–funded project, directly addressing the need to recruit more women into policing by using randomized controlled trials in laboratory and field settings to help researchers and police practitioners understand barriers to entry and facilitators of increased representation of women in policing, as well as recruiting content and strategies to draw more women into the field. She also served on the TTA team for the National Sexual Assault Kit Initiative (SAKI), assisting jurisdictions in establishing widespread, evidence-based, sustainable practices to support survivors of sexual assault. Additionally, Ms. Presler-Jur is a team member on varying RTI projects addressing the unique challenges that jurisdictions face on many criminal justice and public health issues nationwide.

Having joined RTI in 2004, Ms. Presler-Jur has more than 15 years of laboratory experience, including as a research environmental scientist in the Center for Analytical Sciences. In this role, she worked with multidisciplinary teams across diverse agencies for research projects that included air and water quality analysis to understand environmental exposures of underserved populations.

She holds a certificate in public health from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.