Joni Reef is assistant professor of criminology and research fellow at the Department of Criminology, Leiden University.

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Joni Reef is assistant professor of criminology and research fellow at the Department of Criminology, Leiden University. She teaches several courses in Criminology (Bachelor and Master) in Forensic Psychiatry, Development of Criminal behaviour and Statistics and is active in several educational and scientific committees since 2009. She is a reviewer in several international scientific magazines and member of the board of the Netherlands Society of Criminology (NVC) since 2010. She is also member of the European Society of Criminology Working Group ‘Prison life & Effects of Imprisonment’. 

Reef publishes nationally and internationally about the longitudinal development of criminal behaviour, decisive factors in the determination of sentences, the wellbeing of partners and children of delinquents and attitudes with regard to the legitimacy of the penal system. She currently is part of the steering committee of the Prison Project (together with Prof. Dr. P. Nieuwbeerta, Dr. A. Dirkzwager en Prof. Dr. P. van der Laan) which is executed by the Netherlands Institute for the Study of Crime and Law Enforcement (NSCR) and the Department of Sociology of Utrecht University. Her researchgroup, consisting of several Phd-students, postdocs and senior researchers, is concerned with studying intentional and unintentional consequences of imprisonment. This research is an important part of the researchprogramme Criminal Justice: Legitimacy, Accountability and Effectivity of the Institute for Criminal Law & Criminology of Leiden University. 

Joni Reef studied Developmental Psychology and Neuropsychology at the faculty of Psychology and Neuroscience at Maastricht University. At the Department of Neurocognition of this faculty she did a psychophysiological research into cognitive capacities of children with the Prader-Willi Syndrome. After her graduation, she was teaching communication and attitude courses at the Faculty of Medicine at Utrecht University. At the Erasmus University in Rotterdam she was involved with developing educational programs at the Institute for Psychology. From 2004, she worked on her doctoral thesis at the Department of Children- and Youth Psychiatry of the Erasmus Medical Centre in Rotterdam. Her doctoral thesis with the title Adult Consequences of Child Psychopathology concerns the behavioral and emotional problems which develop from childhood until a mature age. Besides developmental courses of antisocial behaviour she also researched the effect of problematic behaviour at an early age on criminal behaviour at a mature age. In july 2009 she was appointed as postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Criminology at the University of Leiden, where she still works as assistant professor.

Publications