Since 2006, Professor Letizia Paoli has been a full professor of criminology at the KU Leuven Faculty of Law. She is also a life member at Clare Hall, University of Cambridge. She has been a visiting scholar or professor at the Universities of Cambridge, Giessen, Manchester, Paris II Panthéon-Assas, Rotterdam, St. Andrews and Tübingen.
Since the early 1990s Paoli has published extensively on organized crime, illegal and semi-illegal markets and related control policies. With Dr. Victoria Greenfield, she has developed a tool to systematically assess the harms of criminal activities. Moreover, with several co-authors, she has launched a program to test this methodology and to compare empirical harm assessments with public perceptions of crime seriousness.
For her work she has received several awards, including the Sellin-Glueck Award of the American Society of Criminology and the Distinguished Scholar Award of the International Association for the Study of Organized Crime.