Beau Kilmer

Biography

Beau Kilmer is a senior policy researcher at the RAND Corporation, where he codirects the RAND Drug Policy Research Center. He is also a professor at the Pardee RAND Graduate School. Kilmer's primary fields of interest are public policy, illicit markets, substance use and treatment, community corrections, and deterrence. He recently started two projects to estimate the size of illicit drug markets in the United States and Europe, and also received funding to evaluate South Dakota's 24/7 Sobriety Project and San Francisco's Community Justice Center. Kilmer also serves as co–principal investigator on several projects at RAND, including a multisite evaluation of low-arrest approaches to shutting down violent drug markets.

Kilmer's work has been published in outlets such as the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Foreign Policy, Addiction, and Journal of Quantitative Criminology. His first-authored RAND report about marijuana legalization in California was called the "most scholarly examination of the issue so far" by the Los Angeles Times. Kilmer's forthcoming book on marijuana legalization (with J. Caulkins, A. Hawken, and M. Kleiman) will be published by Oxford University Press. He is regularly interviewed and quoted in the media, with recent appearances including All Things Considered, CNN, Le Figaro, Los Angeles Times, NBC Nightly News, New York Times, New Zealand Herald, and Rolling Stone.

Before earning his doctorate at Harvard University, Kilmer received a Judicial Administration Fellowship that supported his work with the San Francisco Drug Court.