Liu Jianhong, adjunct distinguished professor in the Faculty of Law at the University of Macau (UM), has been honoured with the 2025 Thorsten Sellin & Sheldon and Eleanor Glueck Award by the American Society of Criminology (ASC) in recognition of his significant contributions to the fields of international and comparative criminology. The award not only celebrates Prof Liu’s academic achievements, but also highlights the significant influence of non-Western scholars in the field of international criminology.

In its congratulatory letter to Prof Liu, ASC stated that the Executive Board is deeply impressed by his academic excellence and highly recognised his ‘substantial contributions to advancing comparative criminology’. They also highlighted Prof Liu’s leadership as the founder of the Asian Criminological Society and the editor-in-chief of the Asian Journal of Criminology, where he has played a key role in promoting the development of criminology in Asia and globally.

Prof Liu joined UM in 2007. To promote the academic institutionalisation of criminology in Asia, he founded the Asian Criminological Society in 2009, with its headquarters at UM. The society has held 15 annual conferences, attracting scholars from Asia and around the world every year. In recent years, Prof Liu established the Centre for Empirical Legal Studies at UM’s Faculty of Law, which is committed to empowering legal research with artificial intelligence and big data technology at the methodological level.

Prof Liu has been the chairman of the Scientific Committee of the International Society of Criminology since 2014. The ‘Relationism Theory of Criminal Justice’ he proposed and developed is the only criminological theory from a non-Western country included in a widely adopted criminology textbook in the US. He has also proposed the ‘context-focused approach’ and pioneered the concept and paradigm of Asian criminology. Prof Liu has published more than 220 publications. In addition, he has received several prestigious international awards, including the 2016 Freda Adler Distinguished Scholar Award from ASC, and the 2018 G. O.W. Mueller Award for Distinguished Scholar from the Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences (ACJS).

The Thorsten Sellin & Sheldon and Eleanor Glueck Award is a prestigious award presented by ASC and is awarded only to scholars who have made remarkable achievements in criminology outside the US. Prof Liu is the second Asian scholar to receive the award since its inception in 1974.