Jaclyn Schildkraut, PhD, is the executive director of the Regional Gun Violence Research Consortium. Prior to this appointment, she served as an associate professor of criminal justice at the State University of New York (SUNY) at Oswego. A national expert on school and mass shootings, Schildkraut’s work focuses on the effectiveness of policies aimed at prevention, mitigation, response, and recovery. Her most recent research, conducted as part of the largest study in the nation to date, examined the effects of school lockdown drills on participants and their skill mastery. In addition to being published in a book and multiple journal articles, the findings of this research are being used by school districts to help improve their emergency response plans. She also has conducted and published research examining the impacts of mass shootings on survivors, which led to her providing an expert report for Canada’s Mass Casualty Commission charged with investigating the April 2020 mass casualty event in Nova Scotia. Other recent projects have considered perceptions of armed teachers and policy responses to mass shootings.

Schildkraut is the co-author of Mass Shootings: Media, Myths and Realities (2016); Columbine, 20 Years Later and Beyond: Lessons from Tragedy (2019); and Lockdown Drills: Connecting Research and Best Practices for School Administrators, Teachers, and Parents (2022). She served as the editor on two additional volumes—Mass Shootings in America: Understanding the Debate, Causes, and Responses (2018) and Guns in American Society: An Encyclopedia of History, Politics, Culture, and the Law (3rd edition; 2022), and has two additional books under contract. Her research related to mass and school shootings also has been published more than 40 scholarly articles that appear in journals such as the American Journal of Criminal Justice, Homicide Studies, Journal of School Violence, Victims & Offenders, School Psychology Review, Educational Policy, Security Journal, and Crime Prevention and Community Safety. Schildkraut’s research and expertise are regularly sought after by local, national, and international news outlets, including CNN, Fox News, The New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, National Public Radio, Associated Press, Reuters, BBC News, and The Telegraph (UK).

Millan AbiNader, PhD, MSW, is a mixed-methods researcher who seeks to understand the social ecology of gender-based violence, with particular attention to intimate partner violence-related fatalities. AbiNader’s work aims to understand how one’s social and geographic position, like race or rurality, affects one’s experience of gender-based violence and investigates how organizational environment, like vicarious traumatization prevention policies, affects survivor-client experiences. Before entering academia, AbiNader worked as a community victim services advocate in the fields of sexual violence, intimate partner violence, family violence, and commercial sexual exploitation/trafficking. She delivered primary prevention interventions from kindergarten through college, facilitated support groups in the community and in carceral settings, and provided advocacy services to incarcerated women. AbiNader earned her MSW from the University of Texas at Austin and her PhD in social work from Boston University, where she completed an award-winning dissertation examining rural intimate partner homicide. AbiNader was a postdoctoral scholar at Arizona State University’s School of Social Work’s Office of Gender-Based Violence under the mentorship of Dr. Jill Messing, where she studied intimate partner homicide and risk assessment.

~ RGVRC Affiliate Scholar ~

Lynn A. Addington, JD, PhD, is a professor in the Department of Justice, Law, and Criminology at American University in Washington, DC. Her research examines fatal and non-fatal violent victimization including post-victimization responses by victims, criminal justice actors, and service providers. Her current work focuses on the experiences of older adults with violence and firearms. Addington is interested in ways to better connect research with practice and policy. She frequently partners with local and national government agencies and nonprofit organizations to support their efforts to address crime and victimization. In 2016, she received American University’s top award for faculty research. Her publications have appeared in a range of outlets, including the Journal of Quantitative Criminology, Justice Quarterly, and Trauma, Violence, and Abuse.

Irshad Altheimer is a professor of criminal justice and the director of the Center for Public Safety Initiatives (CPSI) at Rochester Institute of Technology. He received his BA from Alabama State University and his MA and PhD in sociology from Washington State University. As director of CPSI, Altheimer has partnered with a diverse set of stakeholders supporting the implementation and evaluation of projects seeking to reduce violence and improve the administration of justice. His research has included partnerships with the Rochester Police Department, Monroe County Probation, the Monroe County District Attorney’s Office, Rochester General Hospital, Anthony L. Jordan Health Center, and Rise Up Rochester, Inc. Throughout his career, Altheimer has secured more than $10 million in external funding from federal, state, and private sources.

Altheimer is actively engaged in scholarly research and has published articles in various journals. His publications have appeared in the Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency, Journal of Criminal Justice, Homicide Studies, Journal of Interpersonal Violence, and Policing: An International Journal. His current research seeks to expand knowledge of dispute-related and retaliatory urban violence. He is currently the primary investigator of an innovative project to implement and evaluate a community-based support hub for victims of violence.

Altheimer teaches various courses, including interventions in criminal justice, introduction to criminal justice, and research methods. He also actively engages students outside of the classroom, and mentors student researchers at CPSI on community-based projects.

Mike Anestis is the executive director of the New Jersey Gun Violence Research Center and a professor of urban-global public health in the School of Public Health at Rutgers. He is a licensed clinical psychologist and his research focuses primarily on suicide prevention, with a particular emphasis on the role of firearms. He has published approximately 200 peer-reviewed scientific articles as well as a book entitled Guns and Suicide: An American Epidemic, published in 2018 by Oxford University Press. In 2018, he was awarded the Edwin Shneidman award by the American Association of Suicidology for early career achievement in suicide research and he has since served as a named investigator on several federally funded projects, including a randomized controlled trial of lethal means counseling for firearm owning members of the National Guard (Project Safe Guard).

Amin Asfari is an associate professor and chair of the Criminology Department at Regis University in Denver, Colorado. His research interests are diverse, focusing on understanding how Muslims interact with the criminal justice system (broadly). His publications include books, chapters, and peer-reviewed papers on mass shooters who target Jewish and Muslim communities, police-Muslim relations, mental health and chaplaincy services for incarcerated Muslims, service provisions and reentry programs for formerly incarcerated Muslim prisoners convicted of terrorism charges, Islamophobic hate, as well as the role of vicarious victimization on American Muslims who witness mass shootings. He is currently working on understanding the role of firearms in relation to intimate partner violence and suicide within the Muslim community. His latest book (under review, Lynne Rienner) is an integrated theory of Islamophobia.

Nazsa Baker, PhD, MA, is the new research director and program manager of The Wraparound Project at Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital (ZSFGH) in the Department of Surgery at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF). Baker recently completed her postdoctoral fellowship with the New Jersey Gun Violence Research Center at Rutgers University School of Public Health. She earned her PhD in urban systems with a concentration in urban health Rutgers University, School of Nursing, in October 2021. Her research focuses on community violence with an emphasis on firearm violence survivorship among Black men and hospital-based and hospital-linked violence intervention programs.

Shelby Bandel is a clinical psychology PhD candidate at Rutgers University. She serves as a graduate assistant at the New Jersey Gun Violence Research Center (GVRC). Shelby’s research primarily focuses on firearm suicide prevention with an emphasis on public health approaches. Bandel works to better understand what makes secure storage messaging more effective. Additionally, she is interested in determining avenues for increasing locking device utilization among firearm owners.

Roni Barak Ventura is an assistant professor at the School of Applied Engineering and Technology, New Jersey Institute of Technology. She received a BSc in biology from the University of Rochester in 2014 and a MSc and PhD in biomedical engineering and mechanical engineering from New York University in 2017 and 2021, respectively. Between 2021 and 2023, she served as a science analyst in the Directorate for Engineering at the National Science Foundation. Her research interests include quantitative policy evaluation, causal inference, time series analysis, and human behavior.

Dr. Andrew Baranauskas is an assistant professor in the Department of Criminal Justice at SUNY Brockport. He holds a PhD in criminology and justice policy from Northeastern University. His research interests include crime in the media, public opinion on crime and crime policy, and crime in urban communities. His recent work examines the ways that the media construct violent crime in urban communities. He has also examined public support for gun-related crime policies, such as arming teachers with guns. Baranauskas’ scholarship has appeared in Criminology, Justice Quarterly, and Criminology and Public Policy.

R. Thurman Barnes is the assistant director of the New Jersey Gun Violence Research Center and associate professor at Rutgers University’s School of Public Health. He served in senior roles in the New Jersey General Assembly Office. As chief of staff to then-Assembly Majority Leader Bonnie Watson Coleman, he led her statewide campaign on criminal justice reform, authoring an extensive package of bills hailed by the New York Times as a model for the country. In 2010, incoming Assembly Speaker Sheila Y. Oliver named Barnes as her chief of staff, and he worked to enact multiple legislative proposals by monitoring national trends and culling bi-partisan and stakeholder support.

As area director of state government affairs for a major cable and telecommunications company, Barnes was responsible for all federal, state, and local lobbying efforts within New Jersey. After several successful years, he enrolled full-time at Princeton Theological Seminary. While attending, he served as chaplain at Capital Health Regional Medical Center in Trenton, New Jersey, providing pastoral care to survivors of interpersonal violence and their families.

Barnes later joined the Commissioner of the Department of Community Affairs’ Office as director of policy and external affairs. He served as the point of contact for all elected officials and their staff, advised the Governor’s Office on pending legislation, and worked closely with community-facing organizations and stakeholders to administer Community Service Block Grants.

Barnes holds a BA from the University of California, Los Angeles, cum laude, and a Juris Doctor from Rutgers University School of Law—Newark. He also earned a master of divinity from Princeton Theological Seminary.

~ RGVRC Affiliate Scholar ~

Amy Barnhorst, MD, is an emergency and inpatient psychiatrist whose work doing violence and suicide risk assessments led to her interest in firearm injury prevention. She is a professor of psychiatry and emergency medicine at the University of California–Davis and is the associate director of the California Firearm Violence Research Center. She is a nationally recognized expert on firearms laws and mental illness, and her academic work focuses on the interface between firearms, violence, suicide, and mental illness. Drawing on her previous experience as an outdoor educator, Barnhorst is active in medical education and leads the Bullet Points Project, funded by the State of California, to develop and disseminate a firearm injury prevention curriculum to healthcare providers. She also works with state and federal legislators to craft evidence-based firearm laws. She has presented nationally on these topics and written about them for the New York Times and Slate.

Mary Bernstein is professor of sociology at the University of Connecticut. She publishes broadly in the fields of social movements, politics, race, gender, and law. She is winner of several national awards from the American Sociological Association, has co-edited three books and her articles appear in numerous journals. Her most recent article (co-authored with Jordan Rees and Elizabeth Charash) “Once in Parkland, A Year in Hartford, A Weekend in Chicago: Race and Resistance in the Gun Violence Prevention Movement” is forthcoming in the journal Sociological Forum.

Claire Boine is a research scientist at Theiss Research, a research associate at the Artificial and Natural Intelligence Toulouse Institute, and an Accountable AI in a Global Context research chair at the University of Ottawa where she is the director of the Women and AI research project. Prior to her current role, Boine was a research scholar at the Boston University School of Public Health where she worked on a grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation to bridge the gap between gun owners and non-owners.

Boine’s current research streams include firearm violence prevention, digital manipulation, algorithmic bias, legal feminist theory, artificial life, and long-term AI safety.

After initially studying history (BA Paris IV Sorbonne), Boine completed a master in public policy (Harvard University), a JD (Master 2) in European and international law (Nantes Law School), a master in political science (Toulouse University), and a graduate diploma in conflict analysis (Toulouse University).

Allison E. Bond is a clinical psychology PhD candidate at Rutgers University and a graduate research assistant at the New Jersey Gun Violence Research Center. Her research mainly focuses on firearm suicide prevention. Specifically, she works to better understand who uses a firearm in their suicide death and ways to increase secure firearm storage.

Dr. Branas has conducted research that extends from urban and rural areas in the US to communities across the globe, incorporating place-based interventions and human geography. He has led win-win science that generates new knowledge while simultaneously creating positive, real-world changes and providing health-enhancing resources for local communities. His pioneering work on geographic access to medical care has changed the healthcare landscape, leading to the designation of new hospitals and a series of national scientific replications in the US and other countries for many conditions: trauma, cancer, stroke, etc. His research on the geography and factors underpinning gun violence has been cited by landmark Supreme Court decisions, Congress, and the NIH Director. Dr. Branas has also led large-scale scientific work to transform thousands of vacant lots, abandoned buildings and other blighted spaces in improving the health and safety of entire communities. These are the first citywide randomized controlled trials of urban blight remediation and have shown this intervention to be a highly cost-effective solution to persistent urban health problems like gun violence. He has worked internationally on four continents and led multi-national efforts, producing extensive cohorts of developing nation scientists, national health metrics, and worldwide press coverage.

Dr. Eric Bronson is currently the Dean of the School of Criminal Justice at Roger Williams University and a professor of criminal justice in the school. Dr. Bronson holds a Ph.D. from Bowling Green State University in Corrections and Criminology, specializing in deviance and social control.

Prior to becoming Dean, Dr. Bronson ran the criminal justice program at Lamar University as Director of Criminal Justice for the 9 years prior. He has held faculty positions at Lamar University, Quinnipiac University and West Texas A&M University.

~ RGVRC Affiliate Scholar ~

Kimberly C. Burke is a postdoctoral fellow at Rutgers University in the New Jersey Gun Violence Research Center. Her research uses critical race theory and feminist perspectives to examine police violence and its disproportionate impact on communities of color. She earned a Ph.D. and M.A. in sociology from UC Berkeley, as well as a B.A. from Duke University and an M.A. from San Diego State, both in women’s studies.

Jeffrey A. Butts is a member of the Regional Gun Violence Research Consortium and director of the Research and Evaluation Center at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, City University of New York (CUNY) where he is a research professor. Previously, he was a research fellow with Chapin Hall at the University of Chicago, director of the Program on Youth Justice at the Urban Institute in Washington, DC, and senior research associate at the National Center for Juvenile Justice in Pittsburgh. Butts has managed research projects with budgets totaling $51 Million ($58 Million in 2021 dollars) and he has worked with policymakers and justice practitioners in 28 states and several countries. He has published two books and dozens of monographs and reports for government agencies and foundations, as well as articles in academic and peer-reviewed journals. He graduated with a BA in sociology from the University of Oregon and an MSW from Portland State University before earning his PhD at the University of Michigan. Jeff began his justice career as a drug and alcohol counselor with the juvenile court in Eugene, Oregon.

~ RGVRC Affiliate Scholar ~

Spencer Cantrell, JD, is the co-lead of the National Extreme Risk Protection Orders (ERPO) Resource Center at the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Violence Solutions. In this role, Cantrell trains and provides technical assistance to ERPO implementers nationwide and serves as a national expert and resource on extreme risk protection orders to law enforcement, attorneys, advocates, judges, healthcare providers, news media, and others.

Prior to her role at Johns Hopkins, Cantrell worked for over a decade in victim services and most recently served as the legal & advocacy director at the Greater Washington Jewish Coalition Against Domestic Abuse (JCADA), where she managed a team of attorneys and advocates to represent and assist survivors of domestic violence and sexual assault. While at JCADA, Cantrell also worked on policy at the state and local levels as it affected victim-survivors. Cantrell has a bachelor’s degree from the University of South Carolina in women’s studies & international studies and her juris doctor from George Mason University’s School of Law.

~ RGVRC Affiliate Scholar ~

Joel Capellan, PhD, is an associate professor of criminal justice at John Jay College. He received a PhD in criminal justice from the CUNY Graduate Center/John Jay College in 2016. His research interests center around gun violence, the intersection of race and policing, and policy evaluation. Capellan has published over three dozen articles on these subjects. This work has been featured in multiple national media outlets, such as The Guardian, NPR, New York Magazine, Univision, and ABC News. New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy appointed Capellan to the Regional Gun Violence Research Consortium as a representative for the state.

In addition to research, Capellan has considerable experience training, managing, and implementing policy projects in Central America. I am a co-principal investigator in the Academy for Security Analysis funded by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). Capellan developed and taught courses in policing, data analysis, policy evaluation, and spatial analysis of crime to participants from the public safety sector, local government agencies, and civil society organizations from Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala. During this project, Dr. Capellan collaborated with Poder Judicial (Supreme Court), Secretaria de Seguridad (National Police), Secretaria de Educacion (Department of Education), Mancomunidad de Atlantida, and Jovenes Contra la Violencia (Youths Against Violence) in Honduras to implement and evaluate their USAID-funded projects. He works for the Research Director Inmate Survey and Accusatorial Transition Report, which aims to bring unprecedented insights into the lives, judicial process, and current conditions of inmates in Central America.

~ RGVRC Affiliate Scholar ~

Jennifer Carlson is a professor of sociology at Arizona State University and a MacArthur Fellow (class of 2022). Her work examines the politics of guns in American life. She is the author of Citizen-Protectors: The Everyday Politics of Guns in an Age of Decline (2015, Oxford University Press), Policing the Second Amendment: Guns, Public Law Enforcement and the Politics of Race (2020, Princeton University Press), and Merchants of the Right: Gun Sellers and the Crisis of Democracy (2023, Princeton University Press). Carlson’s work has been featured in the New York Times, PBS, NPR, The Atlantic, The Los Angeles Times, and other national outlets. She is currently working on a National Science Foundation-funded project on gun violence survivors that examines the social, political, legal, and financial fall-out of surviving gun violence in America. She is the founding director of the Center on Guns in Society at Arizona State University, an initiative to support social science approaches to firearm scholarship.

Jenny Caruso is a doctoral candidate in health education at Teachers College, Columbia University. Her research focuses on exploring the experiences of K-12 teachers who have encountered school-based trauma. Her research aims to shed light on the often unexplored facets of school gun violence, emphasizing the unique perspectives and challenges faced by educators in the aftermath of such traumatic incidents within educational settings. Caruso’s time as a K-12 teacher provides a profound foundation that shapes her understanding of the intricate challenges faced by educators dealing with traumatic incidents. This firsthand perspective informs her scholarly pursuits, guiding her efforts to unravel the complex interplay between trauma, teacher experiences, and effective interventions in the aftermath of school-related violence.

~ RGVRC Affiliate Scholar ~

Jacob D. Charles writes and teaches on the Second Amendment and firearms law, with his primary research interests including the legal regulation of state and private violence, Second Amendment doctrine and theory, and the place of guns in the criminal legal system and tort litigation. His scholarship has appeared or is forthcoming in the Harvard Law Review Forum, Michigan Law Review, University of Pennsylvania Law Review, Virginia Law Review, Northwestern University Law Review, and Texas Law Review, among others. Charles frequently comments on legal issues surrounding firearm law and politics. His writing for popular audiences has appeared in The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, Slate, The Hill, Bloomberg Law, and other outlets. Charles has been quoted in news stories in The New York Times, CNN, NPR, Politifact, and others. He has also been invited to speak in numerous public fora about the Second Amendment and the debates over the history, law, and politics of the right to keep and bear arms. Before entering academia, Charles worked in law firms in Washington, DC, and Raleigh, North Carolina, and clerked for federal judges on the trial and appellate courts. He holds an MA in political science, a JD degree from Duke University, an MA in theology and philosophy from Biola University, and a BA in criminology, law, and society and psychology and social behavior from the University of California, Irvine.

Chris Collins, PhD, is an assistant professor of social work in the School of Social Work at Salem State University. He is a licensed independent clinical social worker (LICSW) whose research focuses on privilege and oppression regarding firearm means safety. He developed and piloted Engaging in Lethal Means Safety, an empirically driven, theoretically supported intervention that teaches mental health to first responders on how to engage in means safety discussions with their client systems. As part of the training program, Collins engaged community gun shop partners to offer temporary, off-site storage options to firearm owners who may have been concerned about having firearms in their homes during a developmental or situational crisis.

Collins was recently funded by the New Jersey Gun Violence Research Center to research the ownership and acquisition characteristics of LGBTQ+ firearm owners in the United States. Collins is also sponsored by the Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism, through which he studies the factors associated with and related to deradicalization and disengagement from the “incel” subculture and ideology.

Collins holds an MSW and PhD from Florida State University, where he continues to work as a research affiliate for Maura’s Voice Research Fund. This organization seeks to eradicate violence against women through research and policy.

~ RGVRC Affiliate Scholar ~

Nadine M. Connell, PhD, is an associate professor in the School of Criminology and Criminal Justice at Griffith University and a fellow of the Griffith Criminology Institute, Queensland, Australia. Her research examines the etiology and prevention of school-related violence, with a focus on school shootings and fatal school attacks in both American and international contexts. Connell works with schools to better understand ways to prevent bullying and more extreme forms of youth crime and violence. Connell’s research has been funded by national, state, and local agencies to evaluate school-based violence prevention programs and better understand the antecedents of school shootings. She is currently working with a team of international collaborators to apply lessons learned from the study of American school shootings in other countries. Her work has been published in several peer-reviewed journals. She frequently contributes to the national and international news media on youth violence and victimization issues.

Jordan Costa is a doctoral fellow at New Jersey’s Center on Gun Violence Research (NJGVRC) and a PhD candidate in the School of Criminal Justice at Rutgers — Newark. Her research primarily focuses on structural violence, community-led violence reduction strategies, and the working conditions and well-being of violence intervention specialists. Her contributions in these areas earned her the “Equity and Justice Award” at the National Research Conference on Firearm-Related Harms, alongside several awards for her research endeavors. Before her academic career began, Costa was actively involved in service provision, assisting young men through hospital-based violence intervention programs, and tutoring in jails and prisons in the DC metropolitan area. Her experiences in these roles led to her involvement in the 2021 documentary Life After the Gunshot, which she co-produced to highlight the stories of survivors in the aftermath of violent injury.

In addition to her academic pursuits, Costa serves as senior project manager for the Giffords Center for Violence Intervention. Her role involves uplifting community-led violence intervention and prevention initiatives and advocating for sustainable funding. Her career embodies a holistic approach, integrating research, direct service, and advocacy deeply rooted in her personal history of losing a parent to gun violence

~ RGVRC Affiliate Scholar ~

Rebecca Cowan, PhD, is a faculty member in the College of Social and Behavioral Health at Walden University and an adjunct professor in the Department of Counseling and Human Services at Old Dominion University. As a disaster mental health supervisor with the American Red Cross, she has responded to several mass shootings, including the Route 91 Harvest Festival in Las Vegas, Nevada, Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, and Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas. Cowan also served as a gubernatorial appointee on the Commission to Investigate the May 31, 2019, Virginia Beach Mass Shooting. She has written numerous peer-reviewed articles exploring various aspects of public mass shootings, including the pathway to violence, survivor impacts, mental health issues among mass shooters, and threat assessment. Additionally, Cowan is an associate editor of the Trauma Counseling and Resilience journal. She is a licensed professional counselor and is board-certified in forensic mental health evaluation and forensic behavioral analysis through the National Board of Forensic Evaluators.

Amanda J. Crawford is an assistant professor of journalism at the University of Connecticut where she teaches journalism law and ethics. Her current research focuses on mass shooting denialism, the media’s role in perpetuating misinformation, and the impact on efforts to prevent gun violence. She is a 2020-21 fellow at the UConn Humanities Institute working on a book about the conspiracy theory surrounding the 2012 mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School and the fight against misinformation in the years since. She has recently presented research on how news coverage of mass shootings has contributed to  misinformation and written about the defamation trial of an academic-turned-mass shooting denier for The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Crawford is a former reporter for Bloomberg News, The Arizona Republic and The Baltimore Sun, and she has been published widely by many other outlets including Businessweek, People, National Geographic, and Phoenix Magazine. As a reporter, Crawford covered mass shootings and other incidents of gun violence, followed efforts to reform state and national gun laws, and investigated the trafficking and production of firearms. She held previous faculty appointments in the journalism schools at Western Kentucky University and Arizona State University, where she earned her master of mass communication degree.

~ RGVRC Affiliate Scholar ~

Cassandra Crifasi, PhD, MPH, is an associate professor of health policy and management at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and co-director of the Center for Gun Violence Solutions. She is a core faculty in the Johns Hopkins Center for Injury Research and Policy and the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Disparities Solutions. Crifasi’s research focuses on the intersection of public health and public safety including injury epidemiology and prevention, gun violence and policy, and attitudes and public opinion regarding gun violence solutions. She works to effectively translate her research into evidence-based policies and programs to save lives.

Sarah E. Daly, PhD is an assistant professor and director of the graduate program for the criminology, law, and society department at Saint Vincent College in Latrobe, PA. Her primary area of research is gender-based violence and issues related to involuntary celibates. She previously researched active and mass shootings as well as school violence, and she is the author of Everyday School Violence: An Educator’s Guide to Safer Schools. She has a book manuscript in progress on incels as well as recent publications in the Journal of Qualitative Criminal Justice & Criminology, Critical Criminology, and Sex Roles. She is also co-founder and an editor of the Journal of Mass Violence Research.

~ RGVRC Affiliate Scholar ~

Annalyn DeMello, PhD, MPH, RN, CNE, is an assistant professor at the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston’s Cizik School of Nursing. She is an alumnus of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Future of Nursing Scholars. With a blended background in public health and clinical care, her interdisciplinary research focuses on the psychosocial and behavioral sequela of firearm injury and rehabilitation among adolescents and young adults.

DeMello’s work has informed hospital-based strategies that address long-term health and safety, including behavioral interventions such as safe storage of firearms, clinician-led safety education, and increasing access to mental and behavioral support. She has co-authored position statements for the Texas Nurses Association and teaches population health at the School of Nursing. She mentors students from nursing, medical, and public health schools in firearm injury and violence prevention research and engages them in community efforts to improve social determinants of health.

DeMello graduated from the Cizik School of Nursing at the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston with a bachelor of science in nursing; additionally, she received a bachelor of arts in government and Spanish from the University of Texas Austin. She earned a master of public health degree from Yale University and a PhD in nursing from The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston.

Brandon del Pozo, PhD, MPA, MA, is an assistant professor of medicine and public health at Brown University. He conducts National Institutes of Health (NIH)-funded research at the intersection of public health, public safety, and justice.

Prior to research,  del Pozo served as a police officer for 23 years. Nineteen were spent in the New York City Police Department, where he started on patrol in East Flatbush, Brooklyn. He went on to command two patrol precincts, deploy to Amman, Jordan, as an intelligence liaison, and serve in the police commissioner’s office. He also spent four years as chief of police in Burlington, Vermont.

An elected member of the Council on Criminal Justice and a Law Enforcement Advancing Data and Science (LEADS) scholar at the National Institute of Justice, del Pozo was the 2016 recipient of the Police Executive Research Forum’s Gary Hayes Award for excellence in police leadership and innovation.

His popular writing about public safety and health has been featured in the New York Times, Washington Post, Boston Globe, Philadelphia Inquirer, Chicago Tribune, Vital City, CNN, and the New York Daily News. Del Pozo’s book, The Police and the State: Security, Social Cooperation, and the Public Good, was published by Cambridge University Press.

Jennifer Necci Dineen is an associate professor in residence at the University of Connecticut’s Department of Public Policy. She is a survey methodologist with an interest in understanding the role of stakeholders in policy and intervention uptake. Her research focuses on education policy (school mental health and career and technical education) and gun violence prevention.

Dineen is co-director of the Institute for Collaboration on Health, Intervention, and Policy’s Gun Violence Prevention Research Interest Group and the associate director of ARMS (Advancing Research, Methods, and Scholarship in Gun Violence Prevention). She earned her doctoral degree in political science at the University of Connecticut.

Michaela Dunne is the Deputy Commissioner at the Department of Criminal Justice Information Services (DCJIS).  Ms. Dunne has been employed at DCJIS for 15 years and has served in several different capacities, including supervisor and director of the Firearms Records Bureau (FRB) for eight years and the director of the FRB for one year.  She has worked in her current position for three years, and oversees the DCJIS Law Enforcement and Justice Services division, which includes the FRB, CJIS Support Services unit, and Victim Services unit.  Michaela is also a board member of the Gun Control Advisory Board and chair of the Firearms Licensing Review Board.

Ms. Dunne received both her bachelor’s and graduate degrees in Criminal Justice from Northeastern University.

Dr. Rina Das Eiden is an Applied Developmental Psychologist and a Senior Research Scientist at the Research Institute on Addictions (RIA), University at Buffalo (UB), SUNY. She also has adjunct faculty appointments in the departments of Pediatrics and Psychology. She received her Ph.D. in 1992 from the University of Maryland. She has been conducting research with children of substance using parents for over 25 years. Many of these children experience significant levels of family and community violence since early childhood. The goal of her research has been to understand when and under what circumstances do developmental trajectories of children who are risk for maladjustment due to parental substance abuse and associated risks begin to diverge from normative trajectories? Are there developmental mechanisms that explain the association between these risk factors and children’s developmental and health outcomes? Are there experiences or individual differences in these children that promote resilience in the face of risk or increase the potential for maladjustment? If so, what are these, when do they occur, and are they amenable to intervention? All of this work has been supported by continuous funding mostly from the National Institutes of Health (NIH). She is currently Chair of the Psychosocial Development, Risk and Prevention Study Section in the NIH Center for Scientific Review, received the Clinical Translational Research Award from UB in 2017, and has been editorial board member on leading scientific journals in her field.

Dr. Ayman El-Mohandes, dean of the Graduate School of Public Health & Health Policy, is a pediatrician, and Public Health Academic with a deep commitment to public service. He is an established researcher in the field of infant mortality reduction in minority populations. Dr. El- Mohandes’ funded research focused on populations based interventions in underserved communities locally and globally. His publication record includes innovative approaches towards improving perinatal and neonatal outcomes in high risk populations.

Dean El-Mohandes has served as a senior consultant on multiple global health services and public health interventions, funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), the Asia Development Bank and the Government of South Africa. These projects included the “Healthy Mother Healthy Child” program in Egypt, to upgrade obstetric and neonatal services in the districts with the highest infant mortality, as well as a “Health Services Program” in Indonesia, as well as establishing the first school of public health for black students in South Africa.

He received the Distinguished Researcher Award from the GWU Medical Center and was elected to the Delta Omega National Public Health Honor Society. He elected to The Board of the Association of Schools and Programs in Public Health in 2015 and was presented with the APHA Executive Director Citation Award in 2017. He is an elected member of the American Pediatric Society, and a fellow of the American Academy of Pediatrics.

On May 22, 2013, Dr. El-Mohandes, was named Dean of the CUNY School of Public Health. Under his leadership, the School was fully re-accredited in 2016 as the Graduate School of Public Health and Health Policy located in Harlem.

~ RGVRC Affiliate Scholar ~

H. Jaymi Elsass is a lecturer in the School of Criminal Justice at Texas State University. Her primary research interests include episodic violent crime, moral panics, fear of crime, and juvenile delinquency. Her research on mass shootings heavily centers on the impact of moral panic and the role of the media. She is the co-author of Mass Shootings: Media, Myths, and Realities and has published research in a wide array of academic journals, including American Journal of Criminal Justice, Homicide Studies, Crime, Law & Social Change, Security Journal, Criminology, Criminal Justice, Law & Society, Journal of Crime & Justice, and Sociological Inquiry, as well as contributing to several edited volumes.

Jeffrey Fagan is the Isidor and Seville Sulzbacher Professor of Law at Columbia Law School and Professor of Epidemiology at the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University. He also a Senior Research Scholar at Yale Law School. He was the founding director of the Center for Violence Research and Prevention at the Mailman School. His research and scholarship examine policing and police reform, social and legal regulation of firearms, injury epidemiology, capital punishment, neighborhoods and crime, racial discrimination, drug policy, and juvenile crime and punishment. He served on the Committee on Law and Justice of the National Academy of Science from 2000-2006. He was a member of the 2004 National Research Council panel that examined policing in the US. From 1996-2006, he was a member of the MacArthur Foundation’s Research Network on Adolescent Development and Juvenile Justice. He is a Fellow of the American Society of Criminology. He is past Editor of the Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency, and serves on the editorial boards of several journals in criminology and law. He was an expert consultant to the US Department of Justice in its investigation of the Ferguson (Missouri) Police Department.

Eric Fleegler is a pediatric emergency physician and health services researcher in the Department of Emergency Medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital. Dr. Fleegler attended the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine and completed his residency in pediatrics at the Boston Combined Residency Program. He completed fellowships in pediatric emergency medicine and health services research at Boston Children’s Hospital. Dr. Fleegler has focused his research related to firearm violence on firearm legislation, epidemiology, risk factors, and disparities. He has looked in-depth at the role of firearm legislation at the state level and its role in the reduction of firearm fatalities. His research has evaluated the relationship between the presence of Child Access Prevention laws and lower children firearm fatality rates, removing firearms from people with domestic violence restraining orders and lower domestic violence homicides, and the overall relationship between firearm legislation and lower rates of firearm homicides, suicides, and unintentional fatalities. He is the coeditor of the book, Pediatric Firearm Injuries and Fatalities: The Clinician’s Guide to Policies and Approaches to Firearm Harm Prevention. Dr. Fleegler’s additional research focuses on the development and evaluation of tools to help families with health-related social needs—he developed the system “HelpSteps,” which is now the social service referral tool used by United Way/Mass2-1-1 to help over 100,000 families annually. He is codirector of the Essentials of the Profession: Social Medicine course at Harvard Medical School. His research has been quoted by President Barack Obama and referenced by the Supreme Court.

Margaret K. Formica, MSPH, PhD is an associate professor of Public Health and Preventive Medicine at SUNY Upstate Medical University. She holds a joint appointment in the Department of Urology and is also director of the Data and Analytics Concentration in the Master of Public Health Program, where she teaches several epidemiologic methods courses. Dr. Formica received her M.S.P.H. in Epidemiology from the Arnold School of Public Health at the University of South Carolina and her Ph.D. in Epidemiology from Boston University School of Public Health.

Dr. Formica’s research areas have included the etiology of rheumatoid arthritis and systemic lupus erythematosus, as well as the epidemiology of prostate cancer and renal cell carcinoma. Her research has encompassed the impact of mental health and quality of life on treatment choice in cancer care, as well as health outcomes among cancer patients.

Much of Dr. Formica’s recent work is in the area of gun violence education and research. She has co-authored an action agenda for academic public health around the issue of firearm violence and is currently leading a national task force in collaboration with the Association of Schools and Programs of Public Health to develop curricular resources on gun violence.  Dr. Formica is also working on several research projects related to the descriptive epidemiology of gun violence at the local level and the identification of individual and neighborhood factors associated with gun violence.

Joshua D. Freilich is a professor of criminal justice at John Jay College and a lead investigator for the National Counterterrorism, Innovation, Teaching and Education Center (NCITE), a Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Center of Excellence. Freilich’s research has been funded by DHS and National Institute of Justice (NIJ) and focuses on the causes of and responses to bias crimes, terrorism, cyber-terrorism, mass shootings, and school shootings; open-source research methods; and criminology theory, especially situational crime prevention. His work has been published in Annual Review of Criminology, Crime & Delinquency, Criminology & Public Policy, Journal of Criminal Law & Criminology, Journal of Quantitative Criminology, Justice Quarterly, and Terrorism & Political Violence.

Nicholas Freudenberg is Distinguished Professor of Public Health at the CUNY Graduate School of Public Health and Health Policy.  For the last 10 years, he has studied the global and national impact of the business and political practices of the tobacco, automobile, alcohol, food and beverage, pharmaceutical and firearms industries.  His 2014 book Lethal but Legal Corporations, Consumption and Protecting Public Health(Oxford University Press) compared the strategies these business sectors use to advance their interests and the role of health professionals, governments and social movements in limiting the harmful consequences of  corporate business practices.  Freudenberg has also worked with youth and community organizations, churches, and  jails to create and evaluate interventions to protect young people from community and family violence.  He has published more than 120 scientific publications and his work has been supported by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, the US Centers for Disease Control, the Open Society institute and others.  

~ RGVRC Affiliate Scholar ~

Emma E. Fridel, PhD, is an assistant professor in the College of Criminology and Criminal Justice at Florida State University. Her research focuses on the individual and contextual factors of lethal violence, including homicide, suicide, mass murder, and school shootings. Fridel is a co-author of Extreme Killing: Understanding Serial and Mass Murder (2023), and her work has been funded by the National Institute of Justice and the National Institutes of Health. Fridel’s research on gun violence appears in various journals, including the Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency, Journal of Quantitative Criminology, Justice Quarterly, and Homicide Studies.

~ RGVRC Affiliate Scholar ~

Lisa Geller, MPH, is the senior advisor for implementation at the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Violence Solutions and the co-lead of the Johns Hopkins National ERPO Resource Center (ERC). Geller’s work focuses on research, advocacy, and implementation of evidence-based gun violence prevention policies, including extreme risk protection orders (ERPOs) and domestic violence protective orders. As the co-lead of the ERC, Geller provides training and technical assistance to law enforcement, prosecutors, judges, clinicians, community organizations, and others involved in the ERPO process. Geller is also a mayoral appointee on the District of Columbia’s Domestic Violence Fatality Review Board. Geller graduated Phi Beta Kappa from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she earned her bachelor’s degree in political science. She earned a master of public health (MPH) in health policy and injury and violence prevention from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

~ RGVRC Affiliate Scholar ~

Kristin A. Goss is a public policy and political science professor at the Sanford School of Public Policy at Duke University. She directs Duke’s Semester-in-Washington program and is a member of the university’s honorary Bass Society of Fellows.

Goss’s research focuses on interest groups and civic engagement in America, focusing on gun politics and policy, gender, and philanthropy. She is the author, co-author, or co-editor of numerous articles and book chapters, as well as four books: The Gun Debate: What Everyone Needs to Know (with Philip J. Cook; 1^st ed. 2014, 2^nd ed. 2020), Disarmed: The Missing Movement for Gun Control in America (2006), Gun Studies: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Politics, Policy, and Practice (co-edited with Jennifer Carlson and Harel Shapira; 2018), and The Paradox of Gender Equality: How American Women’s Groups Gained and Lost Their Public Voice (1^st ed. 2012; 2^nd ed. 2020).

Goss is now at work on a book about elite philanthropy in an age of democratic distress. The book focuses on the role of individual and foundation donors in shoring up democratic norms and institutions in the US. Before entering academe, Goss was on the founding staff of The Chronicle of Philanthropy, where she served as a senior editor.

She received a bachelor’s with high honors from Harvard College, a master’s degree in public policy from Duke University, and a PhD in political science from Harvard University. Her doctoral study on the political challenges facing gun violence prevention advocates won the American Political Science Association’s award for best dissertation in public policy (2003).

Dr. Emily Greene-Colozzi is an assistant professor in the School of Criminology and Justice Studies at the University of Massachusetts Lowell. Her research focuses on the situational correlates of public mass gun violence, school violence, and extremist violence, and in particular, on harm mitigation and prevention techniques through environmental design and situational crime prevention. She has developed and contributed to several federally-funded open-source databases measuring rare and mass violence, including her doctoral dissertation (City University of New York, John Jay College of Criminal Justice). Additional research interests include advancing and improving open-source data reliability, transparency, and integrity. Her work has been published in Journal of School Violence, Crime & Delinquency, Justice Quarterly, and Aggression and Violent Behavior.

~ RGVRC Affiliate Scholar ~

Erin Grinshteyn is an associate professor in the public health program at the School of Nursing and Health Professions and associate dean of Health Professionals at the University of San Francisco. Her research examines fear of crime and fear of violent victimization, the association of fear with a variety of health outcomes, and neighborhood characteristics associated with fear of violence. Grinshteyn is particularly interested in population-based health disparities associated with fear of violence and often examines these topics among older adults. She also studies firearm violence with a particular focus on cross-national comparisons of firearm homicide and firearm suicide.

~ RGVRC Affiliate Scholar ~

Stephen Hargarten received his MD from the Medical College of Wisconsin (1975) and his MPH from Johns Hopkins (1984). He is professor of emergency medicine, founding dean of global health, and the founding director of the Comprehensive Injury Center (CIC) at the Medical College of Wisconsin.  Dr. Hargarten’s research interests reflect an intersection of injury and violence prevention and health policy to address the burden of this complex biopsychosocial disease. His work in linking data systems for understanding violent deaths helped to inform the development of CDC’s National Violent Death Reporting System.  He leads ballistics investigations with bullets linked to civilian deaths and injuries.  He has been recently been awarded a National Endowment of Humanities grant (with colleagues at Wesleyan University) to study gun safety patents (from 1750–2010).  He has been actively engaged in implementing the Cardiff Model in the Western Hemisphere.

Dr. Hargarten was inducted into the Johns Hopkins Society of Scholars and was elected to the Institute of Medicine, (now the National Academy of Medicine (NAM)) of the National Academy of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM), in 2011.  He was the founding president of the Society for the Advancement of Violence and Injury Research (SAVIR).  He currently serves on the Community Preventive Services Task Force of the CDC as vice-chair.

Professor Harvey is Professor of Politics, Affiliated Professor of Law, and Director of the Public Safety Lab at New York University. She has served as Chair of the Department of Politics and as Interim Dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Science. Her work with the Public Safety Lab uses the tools of data science and social science to promote cost-effective public safety, with an awareness of both resource and social costs. The Public Safety Lab works with communities and law enforcement agencies to design, implement, and test analytic solutions that meet jurisdictions’ needs. The Public Safety Lab is currently working with several law enforcement jurisdictions to design and build analytic solutions that address officer safety in responding to 911 calls, the potential for human error in the priority codes assigned to calls for service, and strategies to identify human trafficking victims from the online corpus of commercial sex ads and provider reviews. The Lab is also engaged in a randomized controlled trial of a platform that pushes an SMS-based survey to recent 911 callers, asking them to rate their experience of the police response. The Public Safety Lab is also developing and piloting a mobile application that will allow a community to partner with a policing agency to co-produce public safety. Through the app, criminal investigators will be able to communicate with civilians near the location and time of day of recently committed crimes, with the capacity to solicit and receive video, photographic, or textual information.

David Hemenway, Ph.D., is an economist and Professor at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and a former James Marsh Visiting Professor at the University of Vermont.  He is Director of the Harvard Injury Control Research Center, former director of the Harvard Youth Violence Prevention Center and former President of the Society for the Advancement of Violence and Injury Research.  He received the Excellence in Science award from the American Public Health Association and fellowships from the Pew, Soros and Robert Wood Johnson foundations.  In 2012 he was recognized by the CDC as one of the twenty “most influential injury and violence professionals over the past 20 years.” In 2013 he received a Commissioner’s Commendation from the Boston Police Commissioner for exemplary services to the people of Boston.  Dr. Hemenway has written over 200 journal articles—more than 100 on gun violence– and five books including Private Guns Public Health (U Michigan Press 2006) and While We Were Sleeping: Success Stories in Injury and Violence Prevention (U California Press 2009).  Dr. Hemenway has received ten Harvard teaching awards.

~ RGVRC Affiliate Scholar ~

Dr. Brooklynn Hitchens is an assistant professor in the Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice at the University of Maryland. Her research examines how inequalities of race, class, and gender shape participation in crime, risks for victimization, and involvement with police. She primarily focuses on women and crime through examining how street-identified Black women and girls grapple with gun violence in low-income communities. Using participatory action research (PAR) methods, she partners with these communities to reduce racial disparities in violence exposure. Her work is primarily qualitative, through the use of ethnography, interviews, and focus groups, and she also utilizes mixed methods.

Dr. Bernadette Hohl is senior research investigator with the Penn Injury Science Center (PISC) at the University of Pennsylvania. She works collaboratively in the Philadelphia Department of Public Health’s Injury Prevention Program to plan, manage, and implement gun violence prevention research and evaluation activities for the city. She has over 20 years of violence prevention practice and research experience, including delivering community health education programs, managing large scale state and federal programmatic and research grants, and supervising teams of site coordinators providing services to at-risk youth and families. Her research focuses on place-based violence prevention approaches that center the lived experience. She employs mixed methods, community-engaged approaches, and epidemiological study designs to study risk and protective factors for violence and test interventions to improve health and safety for communities that experience high rates of violence and structural disadvantage. Hohl secured state funding to establish the New Jersey Gun Violence Research Center and has been supported by public and private extramural funding agencies including the National Institute of Justice (NIJ), National Institutes of Health (NIH), and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Her work has been presented at national and international scientific meetings and appears in high-impact, peer-reviewed journals.

~ RGVRC Affiliate Scholar ~

Joshua Horwitz, JD, is the Dana Feitler professor of the practice in gun violence prevention and advocacy at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and the co-director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Violence Solutions. He works to reduce gun violence by utilizing public health research and health equity analysis to build advocacy campaigns that meet critical opportunities in the policy development process. With over 30 years of experience, Horwitz is a key leader in firearm policy development and education. He and a small group of colleagues developed the extreme risk protection order (ERPO) policy, which is now law in 21 states and the District of Columbia. As a result, he is now the principal investigator of the national Johns Hopkins ERPO Resource Center at Johns Hopkins University, a Department of Justice-funded training and technical assistance hub that provides support to states implementing extreme risk protection orders. Horwitz has also developed many policy translation reports, including the newly released “Alcohol Misuse and Gun Violence: An Evidence-Based Approach for State Policy” and the original report from the Consortium for Risk-Based Firearm Policy, “Guns, Public Health, and Mental Illness: An Evidence-Based Approach,” which identified ERPOs as a needed policy tool. He has also testified before numerous state legislatures and the US Congress. Horwitz is the co-author of Guns, Democracy and the Insurrectionist Idea, published by the University of Michigan Press in 2009. He received his BA from the University of Michigan in 1985 and his JD from The George Washington University in 1988.

Heather Howard is a lecturer in Public Affairs at Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, where she teaches courses on implementation of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), the social determinants of health, and state and local health policy, and is a faculty affiliate of the Center for Health & Wellbeing. She is director of the State Health and Value Strategies program, a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation-funded program that provides technical assistance to states to support efforts to transform health and health care. She served as New Jersey’s Commissioner of Health and Senior Services from 2008-2010.  She also has significant federal experience, having worked as Senator Jon Corzine’s Chief of Staff, as Associate Director of the White House Domestic Policy Council and Senior Policy Advisor for First Lady Hillary Clinton, as an Honors Attorney in the U.S. Department of Justice’s Antitrust Division Health Care Task Force, and for the U.S. House of Representatives.  She received her B.A. from Duke University and her J.D. from NYU School of Law.

Allan Jiao, professor of Law & Justice Studies, has published extensively on public policy, policing, and criminal research. He has conducted research for many police organizations in the U.S. and abroad, including Hong Kong. He served as a research consultant for the National Development and Research Institute, as well as the Superior Court of New Jersey. He’s a longtime Rowan professor.

Publications include:

Jiao, Allan Y. (2015). Police Auditing: Standards and Applications. Springfield, IL: Charles C Thomas Publisher.

Jiao, Allan Y. (2014). The Eastern City Gun Project: Exploring Contextual and Operational Variables. Journal of Police and Criminal Psychology, 29(1): 10-21. DOI 10.1007/s11896-013-9117-y.

Jiao, Allan Y. (2013). Gun Incidents at the Local Level: Understanding the Demographic Variables. Criminal Justice Studies: A Critical Journal of Crime, Law and Society, 26(2): 213-227.

Jiao, Allan Y. (2007). The Police in Hong Kong: A Contemporary View. Lanham, MD: University Press of America.

Blair T. Johnson is a Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor in the University of Connecticut’s Department of Psychological Sciences. He has been a prominent scientific methodologist throughout his career, especially in relation to meta-analysis, which he labels “the original big data.” Other recent methods work has focused on spatiotemporal strategies to bring community- and neighborhood-level factors to bear on health behavior and health behavior change, including gun violence, HIV/AIDS, exercise and blood pressure, placebo responding in antidepressants, and strategies to improve mental and physical health and to promote healthy lifestyle choices. He has been awarded numerous grants from the U.S. Public Health Service and other sources. He is a fellow of numerous organizations, ranging from the American Psychological Association (APA) to the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). Currently, Dr. Johnson is a Senior Editor with the journal Social Science & Medicine and Editor of Psychological Bulletin.

Ieva Jusionyte is the Watson Family University associate professor of international security and anthropology at Brown University. A legal and medical anthropologist who studies borders, violence, and security, she is the author of several books, including award-winning ethnography Threshold: Emergency Responders on the US-Mexico Border (2018) and Exit Wounds: How America’s Guns Fuel Violence Across the Border (2024). Her research has been supported by the National Science Foundation and fellowships from the Harvard Radcliffe Institute, the Fulbright Program, and the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center, among others. Jusionyte has written about her research for The Atlantic, the Los Angeles Times, The Boston Globe, and The Guardian and discussed it broadly in the media, including on BBC and NPR. She is a member of the Advisory Committee of Global Action on Gun Violence. She is also a certified EMT-paramedic who volunteered as an emergency responder in Massachusetts, Florida, and Arizona.

David M. Kennedy is a professor of criminal justice at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City and the director of the National Network for Safe Communities at John Jay. Mr. Kennedy and the National Network support cities implementing strategic interventions to reduce violence, minimize arrest and incarceration, enhance police legitimacy, and strengthen relationships between law enforcement and communities. These interventions have been proven effective in a variety of settings, have amassed a robust evaluation record, and are widely employed nationally.

Mr. Kennedy’s work has won two Ford Foundation Innovations in Government awards, two Webber Seavey Awards from the International Association of Chiefs of Police, and two Herman Goldstein Awards for problem-oriented Policing. He was awarded the 2011 Hatfield Scholar Award for scholarship in the public interest. He helped develop the “Operation Ceasefire” homicide prevention strategy; High Point Drug Market Intervention strategy; the Justice Department’s Strategic Approaches to Community Safety Initiative; the Treasury Department’s Youth Crime Gun Interdiction Initiative; the Bureau of Justice Assistance’s Drug Market Intervention Program; and the High Point Domestic Violence Intervention Program.

Mr. Kervick is the Executive Director of the Delaware Criminal Justice Council, the State Administering Agency (SAA) for all OJP funding where he has spent the past twenty years. In this position his duties include the statewide strategic planning and development, implementation and administration of all criminal justice grant funds and programs in the state of Delaware, totaling approximately $30 million in various federal block grant areas.  The Delaware Criminal Justice Council is an independent body in the Executive Branch of state government committed to leading the criminal justice system through a collaborative approach that calls upon the experience and creativity of the Council, all components of the criminal justice system and the community. The goal is to continually strive for an effective system which is fair, efficient and accountable.

Under the past two administrations, Mr. Kervick served as the Deputy Director of the Delaware Criminal Justice Council and implemented tens of millions of dollars of criminal justice programming in the fields of juvenile justice, law enforcement, corrections, victim’s services and re-entry.  In 2009, he implemented the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act grant program statewide as well as oversaw the daily operations of the agency. He has authored several publications on youth violence, crime and delinquency, and specialty courts. Mr. Kervick has also presented at several state, regional, and national conferences.

In 2016, Mr. Kervick was elected to and still serves in the position of Vice President of the National Criminal Justice Association in Washington, DC.  Mr. Kervick has served on the NCJA Advisory Council and the Board of Directors from 2008 – present. From 2011 – present, he was elected to serve the NCJA as Chair of the Northeast region and Chair of the elections committee.

Mr. Kervick holds a B.A. in Criminal Justice from the University of Delaware and has been elected into the National Sociology and Criminal Justice Honor Society, Alpha Kappa Delta. Mr. Kervick also holds a Masters degree in Criminology from St. Josephs University in Philadelphia, PA.

Mr. Kervick is an Adjunct Professor at Wilmington University in the Criminal Justice and Social Science department.

In 2010, the Washington, DC based Coalition for Juvenile Justice (CJJ) honored Mr. Kervick with the Gobar Outstanding National Juvenile Justice Specialist award.

Dr. Louis Klarevas is a research professor at Teachers College, Columbia University, and the author of Rampage Nation: Securing America from Mass Shootings (2016). In the past, he has taught at American University, George Washington University, City University of New York, New York University, and the University of Massachusetts–Boston. He has also held the positions of defense analysis research fellow at the London School of Economics and Political Science and as United States senior Fulbright scholar in security studies at the University of Macedonia. An authority on mass shootings and school violence in the United States, he has served as an expert witness in cases involving gun violence and firearm laws as well as a consultant to the federal government on security and counter-terrorism issues. His research focuses on the intersection of public safety and public health, with an emphasis on the means of violence.

~ RGVRC Affiliate Scholar ~

Brent R. Klein, PhD, is an assistant professor of criminology and criminal justice at the University of South Carolina. He specializes in generating refined explanations of violence and producing empirical evidence to guide public policy. His interdisciplinary approach combines elements from sociology, developmental and life-course criminology, situational theories, and decision-making processes to foster comprehensive insights into the emergence, causes, and prevention of various violent actions.

Klein’s primary areas of study extend to a range of urgent societal issues. This work has focused on school and firearms-related violence, mass shootings, homicide, terrorism, and bias-motivated crimes. His research findings have been featured in reputable, peer-reviewed publications such as Justice Quarterly, Criminology & Public Policy, Crime & Delinquency, Homicide Studies, Journal of School Violence, and Journal of Interpersonal Violence, among others.

Klein remains the principal investigator for the National Institute of Justice (NIJ) funded longitudinal study on the pathways to school shootings. Moreover, he has co-developed two additional NIJ-funded projects: The American School Shooting Study (TASSS) and the Comparative Gun Violence Project (CGVP). Klein’s affiliations extend to the US Extremist Crime Database (ECDB) and the American Terrorism Study (ATS), where he serves as an affiliate scholar. In the past, Klein has provided his expertise as a research consultant to the Michigan State Police’s (MSP) task force on school safety. In addition, he was the inaugural student board member for the American Society of Criminology’s Division on Terrorism & Bias Crimes (DTBC). Klein is a fellow of the Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences (ACJS) Doctoral Summit and the NIJ’s Graduate Research Fellowship (GRF).

~ RGVRC Affiliate Scholar ~

Hannah Klein is an assistant professor in Lewis University’s Justice, Law, and Public Safety Studies Department and serves as the director of the Center for Community Research & Education. Dr. Klein uses mixed methods to focus on prevention and intervention research that centers on cultural responsiveness and trauma experiences to inform the findings. Dr. Klein is seeking to understand the role of societal institutions as providers of firearm safe storage education to reduce the number of unnecessary injuries and deaths of children. This work is inspired by her work in child welfare and violence prevention in the City of Philadelphia which led her to pursue her Ph.D. from Temple University. She also has her M.P.A. from Villanova University.

Dr. John M. Klofas is the director of the Center for Public Safety Initiatives at the Rochester Institute of Technology, where he manages a joint project of the City of Rochester, Rochester Police Department and RIT to provide analysis of criminal justice data and policy for the criminal justice system including police, prosecution, community supervision and corrections.

Dr. Klofas’s current areas of focus include community level crime and justice issues including violence, management in criminal justice, and strategies and practices in policing. He has received external funding and published widely in these areas. His most recent book collaboration is an examination of changes in criminal justice at the community level titled The New Criminal Justice.

Professor Klofas continues to serve as a research partner with local criminal justice agencies, on the state’s police training commission and on several national projects addressing community violence. He also works with several police departments across the country on issues of risk management as part of reform focused consent decrees in the Federal Courts.

Dr. Klofas received his bachelor’s degree from the College of the Holy Cross and his master’s and doctorate in Criminal Justice from the State University of New York at Albany.

~ RGVRC Affiliate Scholar ~

Matthew Lacombe received his PhD from Northwestern University. Lacombe is an Alexander Lamis associate professor of American politics at Case Western Reserve University. He has written widely about the politics of guns, focusing in particular on gun-related interest groups and political participation in the gun debate. Matt is the author of Firepower: How the NRA Turned Gun Owners into a Political Force (Princeton University Press, 2021), which examines how the National Rifle Association has built and exercised political power. His work has been discussed in a wide range of media outlets, including the New York Times, New Yorker, NPR, Guardian, Washington Post, Vox, FiveThirtyEight, and Time.

~ RGVRC Affiliate Scholar ~

Adam Lankford, PhD, is a professor of criminology & criminal justice at the University of Alabama. He is the author of two books and many peer-reviewed journal articles. His research on mass shooters examines their firearms acquisition, psychological tendencies, homicidal intentions, mental health problems, suicidal motives, fame-seeking tactics, copycat behavior, and sexual frustration, along with strategies that could reduce the prevalence of their attacks. Lankford’s findings have been published in various academic journals, including Justice Quarterly, Criminology & Public Policy, Behavioral and Brain Sciences, Homicide Studies, Aggression and Violent Behavior, American Behavioral Scientist, Journal of Criminal Justice, and Journal of Personality Assessment. Lankford had his findings cited by The White House in 2015 and by every major media outlet in the United States and international media from more than 40 countries.

Mike Lawlor is a nationally recognized expert on criminal justice reform which was a major focus of his 24 years as a member of the Connecticut House of Representatives and as former Connecticut Governor Dannel P. Malloy’s undersecretary for criminal justice policy and planning in the Office of Policy and Management.

Elected to the Connecticut House of Representatives in 1986 representing East Haven’s 99th district, he chaired the House Judiciary Committee from 1995 to 2011, taking a leadership role in a wide variety of criminal justice reforms, including a law that established rights for crime victims.

He was a founding board member of the Council of State Governments Justice Center, and he’s served on numerous national criminal justice reform commissions. He also led the push for legislation that made Connecticut the second state in the nation to pass a law allowing same-sex couples to enter into civil unions.

~ RGVRC Affiliate Scholar ~

Cheryl Lero Jonson is an associate professor in the Department of Criminal Justice at Xavier University in Cincinnati, Ohio. She received her PhD in criminal justice from the University of Cincinnati in 2010. Her research examines public opinion regarding various criminal justice issues and policies and the effectiveness and psychological impact of active assailant training. She recently has conducted several large-scale national studies exploring the public’s perception of the causes of mass shootings, gun ownership, appropriate punishments for those who engage in mass violence, policies to reduce school shootings, and the police response to shootings occurring in schools. Her work has been published in Criminology, Justice Quarterly, Criminology & Public Policy, Crime & Justice: A Review of Research, and the Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency Jonson’s findings have been cited by the United States Supreme Court and various media outlets. Jonson also is the chair and founding member of the American Society of Criminology’s Division of Public Opinion & Policy.

Esprene Liddell-Quintyn, PhD, is a postdoctoral fellow at the New Jersey Gun Violence Research Center at Rutgers University, School of Public Health. She currently leads the methodological development and implementation of qualitative research projects focused on better understanding gun violence with an emphasis on interpersonal violence. Her specific research interest examines the intersection of intimate partner violence and firearms among African American, Caribbean, and immigrant women. Liddell-Quintyn intentionally moves beyond traditional research approaches that rely on intrapsychic treatment models. She instead focuses on conducting research in partnership with communities to co-create systemic solutions that target intimate partner violence among people of color. As a community-engaged scholar (CES), she uses Community-Based Participatory Research (CBPR) to ground her work. In doing so, she works with communities instead of on communities.

Patricia Logan-Greene, MSSW, Ph.D., is an Associate Professor of Social Work at the University at Buffalo. Her researches focuses on the intersection of violent victimization and perpetration, particularly among youth and families. She is also interested in improving system responses to violence within the juvenile and adult criminal justice systems and child welfare.

Jody Lyneé Madeira, J.D., Ph.D. is a Research Associate at the University at Albany’s Capital Punishment Research Initiative (CPRI) and Professor of Law and Louis F. Niezer Faculty Fellow at the Indiana University Maurer School of Law. Through her research and scholarship, she uses qualitative and quantitative methods to examine a variety of subjects, including the Second Amendment and social and legal regulation of firearms, assisted reproductive technologies; bioethics and informed consent; law and medicine; torts and products liability, and capital punishment. She is the author of Killing McVeigh: The Death Penalty and the Myth of Closure (New York University Press, 2012) and Taking Baby Steps: How Patients and Fertility Clinics Collaborate in Conception(University of California Press, 2018).

Michelle Lyttle Storrod is an assistant professor of criminal justice at Widener University and is an affiliate of the SAFElab at the University of Pennsylvania. She received her PhD from Rutgers University–Camden. Michelle is the coauthor of the largest violence prevention charity in Europe. Her cross-national scholarly pursuits center on the intricate intersection of youth, social media, and crime. Specifically, her research delves into how young people utilize social media platforms and mobile devices within the context of crime and victimization including drug trafficking, sex trafficking, and serious youth violence. She has shared her research at the House of Lords and the Ministry of Justice; it is also cited in a range of UK policies. Drawing from over a decade of practical experience working with gangs, Michelle’s research direction is deeply rooted in a commitment to supporting young people, with a focus on girls. Michelle’s most recent work looks at the role of women in community violence intervention conducted in spaces that include the digital world.

~ RGVRC Affiliate Scholar ~

Eric Madfis, PhD, is a professor of criminal justice at the University of Washington-Tacoma, where his research focuses on the causes and prevention of school violence, hate crime, and mass murder. He also serves as director of the Violence Prevention and Transformation Research Collaborative. As a nationally and internationally recognized expert on school and mass shootings, Madfis has spoken to audiences across the country and around the world about his research, including to the United States Congress and the Washington State Legislature. His work has been published in academic journals across a range of disciplines and featured in national and international media outlets. He is the author of How to Stop School Rampage Killing: Lessons from Averted Mass Shootings and Bombings and co-editor of All-American Massacre: The Tragic Role of American Culture and Society in Mass Shootings.

~ RGVRC Affiliate Scholar ~

Lauren A. Magee, PhD, is an assistant professor at the Paul H. O’Neill School of Public and Environmental Affairs at Indiana University Indianapolis. Magee’s interdisciplinary research intersects the fields of public health and criminal justice. It focuses on how social determinants of health, poverty, and neighborhood dynamics influence firearm violence and other health outcomes among adolescents and young adults. Her research takes a mixed-methods approach by leveraging police and healthcare data linked at the individual level and qualitative interviews with firearm injury survivors to identify intervention opportunities. Recently, her work has examined the health and health outcomes among people exposed to firearm injury, particularly siblings and children of survivors. She received her PhD in criminal justice from Michigan State University in 2018. She completed a postdoctoral research fellowship in the Division of Children’s Health Services Research at the Indiana University School of Medicine in 2020.

~ RGVRC Affiliate Scholar ~

Ashley M. Mancik, PhD, is an assistant professor of criminology and criminal justice at the University of South Carolina. Her areas of expertise include lethal and non-lethal violence, crime trends, and crime clearance, with a current emphasis on gun violence, domestic violence, and mass violence. She strongly emphasizes creating and sustaining researcher-practitioner partnerships, advocating for evidence-based policy, and aiming to strengthen these connections whenever possible. She previously worked as an Honors intern in the FBI’s Violence Prevention Section/Active Shooter Unit in DC and as part of the Safe Streets/Violent Crimes Task Force addressing gun violence in Wilmington, Delaware. Mancik’s scholarship and teaching are largely informed by her experiences working alongside community partners and criminal justice agencies. As a result, her research currently focuses on how methodological considerations, particularly measurement and conceptualization, of key constructs contribute to disparate empirical findings and the associated policy implications. Her research in these areas has been published in peer-reviewed journals such as Annual Review of Criminology, Crime & Delinquency, Homicide Studies, Journal of Crime & Justice, and Journal of Interpersonal Violence, among other outlets.

Anthony D. Mancini, PhD, is a clinical psychologist and an associate professor of psychology at Pace University. His studies include psychological resilience, individual differences in stress responses, and social processes’ role in adaptation to acute stress. His work has examined the Virginia Tech campus shootings, the 9/11 terrorist attacks, military deployment, traumatic injury, bereavement, having a child, and the COVID-19 pandemic. Mancini has argued that acute adversity can directly improve, in some cases, psychological functioning, a phenomenon he describes as “psychosocial gains from adversity.” He is the principal investigator on a four-year National Institutes of Health grant to study the psychological, social, and economic aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic. Additionally, Mancini serves as the chief editor of Anxiety, Stress & Coping, a Taylor & Francis Group journal. His work has been featured in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Deseret News, The Mercury News, and other outlets. Mancini has published over 60 journal articles and book chapters.

~ RGVRC Affiliate Scholar ~

Hunter Martaindale is the director of research at the Advanced Law Enforcement Rapid Response Training (ALERRT) Center and an associate professor of research at the School of Criminal Justice and Criminology at Texas State University. Martaindale’s research focuses on law enforcement performance in response to dynamic use of force encounters such as active shooter events. This research includes assessing law enforcement decision-making generally and the impact of acute stress on performance. Additionally, Martaindale disseminates data on active attack events through his work at the ALERRT Center.

Dr. Miller is Professor of Health Sciences and Epidemiology at Northeastern University, Adjunct Professor of Epidemiology at the Harvard School of Public Health, and Co-Director of the Harvard Injury Control Research Center. Dr Miller is an expert in injury and violence prevention. His research approaches both intentional and unintentional injury as causes of death and morbidity that can be prevented using an injury prevention paradigm. By conceptualizing intentional violence as a preventable injury, Dr Miller’s scholarship attends to the nature of the agent of injury and the contextual aspects of the physical and social environment that can be modified to prevent death and reduce injury severity without necessarily affecting underlying behavior.  In addition to empirical work in injury prevention, Dr. Miller’s scholarship includes work that focuses on the fundamental and often unrecognized tension between research and therapy in clinical trials. Dr. Miller is Assistant Editor of the journal Injury Epidemiology and a recipient of the Excellence in Science Award from the American Public Health Association. Dr. Miller teaches research methods at Northeastern.

Jayna Moceri-Brooks, PhD, RN, is a clinical assistant professor at New York University’s (NYU) Rory Meyers College of Nursing. Her research focuses on firearm injury prevention, combat-related traumatic brain injuries, and risk factors for suicidal thoughts and behaviors among service members and veterans, with a particular focus on military culture. Findings from her research have shaped federal policies aimed at reforming the care and recognition of service members with traumatic brain injuries.

Moceri-Brooks serves on the community advisory board of the Harvard/Massachusetts General ReBlast research team. She has also maintained her practice as an emergency nurse for over 16 years.

Moceri-Brooks is currently engaged in research projects that examine factors influencing firearm storage practices among veterans. She also continues to collaborate with members of Congress on policies related to blast overpressure injuries and firearm injury prevention within the military.

Prior to joining the faculty at NYU Meyers, Moceri-Brooks was a post-doctoral fellow at the New Jersey Gun Violence Research Center at Rutgers University where she focused on firearm injury prevention among civilian and military populations and worked across a portfolio of Department of Defense-funded suicide prevention research projects.

Dr. Amanda Nickerson, PhD, NCSP, is a professor and director of the Dr. Jean M. Alberti Center for the Prevention of Bullying Abuse and School Violence at the University at Buffalo, State University of New York. Nickerson’s research focuses on school crisis prevention and intervention, with a particular emphasis on violence and bullying. She has examined the role of schools, parents, and peers in preventing violence and enhancing the social-emotional strengths of children and adolescents. Nickerson is the lead author of Assessing, Identifying, and Treating Posttraumatic Stress Disorder at School (2009, Springer), co-author of School Crisis Prevention and Intervention: The PREPaRE Model (2009, National Association of School Psychologists [NASP]), and co-editor of Handbook of School Violence and School Safety: International Research and Practice, 2nd Edition (2012, Routledge). She has published over 80 journal articles and book chapters. Her research has been funded by the National Institutes of Health, the American Educational Research Association, the NYS Office of Child and Family Services, The Committee for Children, and the NYS Developmental Disabilities Planning Council.

Nickerson is a fellow of the American Psychological Association (Division 16) and is Coordinator of Research for the National Association of School Psychologists (NASP) School Safety and Crisis Prevention Committee. She has served as associate editor of the Journal of School Violence and is a member of several other editorial boards (Journal of School Psychology, School Psychology Review). She serves on the executive board of the New York Association of School Psychologists and is a member of Governor Cuomo’s Suicide Prevention Task Force.

A licensed psychologist in New York state and a Nationally Certified School Psychologist, Nickerson is committed to the scientist-practitioner model of training. She views research and science as foundational to good practice, and helps practitioners use this knowledge to guide practice. Nickerson has conducted hundreds of presentations for educators and mental health professionals in the United States and other countries. She has also worked in close collaboration with schools and other child-serving agencies to guide them in using data to inform practice, particularly related to improving social-emotional and behavioral functioning and preventing bullying and violence.

Michael Ostermann is an Associate Professor at the Rutgers University School of Criminal Justice and Co-Director of the New Jersey Center on Gun Violence Research.  His research interests primarily lie within the fields of prisoner reentry and corrections, and how they intersect with public policy.  His recent work investigates the impact of post-release reentry services upon recidivism, whether effects vary across different levels of programmatic quality, how the privatization of correctional services influence mechanisms of social control, and how measurement strategies by researchers translate into different policy prescriptions within evaluation research. Ostermann has served as Principal Investigator on several federally funded grants that investigate research questions about evidence-based crime policies, and include partnerships with practitioners and other criminal justice stakeholders. The American Probation and Parole Association have awarded his research activities, and he received the American Society of Criminology’s Division on Sentencing and Corrections’ Distinguished New Scholar award in 2016 for his early career scientific contributions. His student mentoring efforts have been awarded by Rutgers University, and The College of New Jersey (his alma mater) and the American Criminal Justice Association have awarded him for his service contributions as a publicly engaged scholar.

Jennifer Paruk, PhD, is a postdoctoral fellow at Rutgers University in the New Jersey Gun Violence Research Center (NJGVRC). She received her PhD in criminal justice from Michigan State University and her masters in public health from Boston University. Her research interests overlap between criminal justice and public health. Paruk’s research focuses on the intersection of intimate partner violence, suicide, and firearm injury prevention.

Desmond Upton Patton is the Brian and Randi Schwartz University professor and the 31st Penn Integrates Knowledge University professor. He has joint appointments in the School of Social Policy & Practice and the Annenberg School for Communication along with a secondary appointment in the department of psychiatry in the Perelman School of Medicine all at the University of Pennsylvania.

Patton’s groundbreaking research into the relationship between social media and gang violence—specifically how communities constructed online can influence often harmful behavior offline—has led to his becoming the most cited and recognized scholar in this increasingly important area of social science. His early work attempting to detect trauma and preempt violence on social media led to his current roles as an expert on language analysis and bias in AI and a member of Twitter’s Academic Research advisory board and Spotify’s Safety Advisory Council. As a social worker, Patton realized existing gold standard data science techniques could not accurately understand key cultural nuances in language amongst predominantly Black and Hispanic youth. In response, he created the Contextual Analysis of Social Media (CASM) approach to center and privilege culture, context and inclusion in machine learning, and computer vision analysis.

Justin Pickett, PhD, is a professor in the School of Criminal Justice at the University at Albany, SUNY. He received his PhD from Florida State University in 2011 and was awarded the American Society of Criminology’s Ruth Shonle Cavan Young Scholar Award in 2015. Pickett has published over 100 peer-reviewed articles. His research is focused on determining the extent and correlates of firearm ownership in the United States, and on investigating public opinion about gun policy.

Eric L. Piza, PhD, is a professor of criminology and criminal justice, director of Crime Analysis Initiatives, and co-director of the Crime Prevention Lab at Northeastern University. His research focuses on the spatial analysis of crime patterns, evidence-based policing, and crime control technology. Before entering academia, Piza served as the GIS specialist of the Newark, New Jersey Police Department, responsible for the day-to-day crime analysis and program evaluation activities of the agency. He received his PhD from Rutgers University.

~ RGVRC Affiliate Scholar ~

Jesenia M. Pizarro, PhD, is a professor in the School of Criminology and Criminal Justice at Arizona State University. She is a three-time alumna from Rutgers University’s School of Criminal Justice (Newark, New Jersey), earning her BS, MA, and PhD from the University. Her transdisciplinary research focuses on the proximal event and situational factors that result in violence, the processing of violent crime in the criminal justice system, and antiviolence strategies. Her research also explores correctional practices in the United States. Pizarro is a board member of the Research Society for the Prevention of Firearm-Related Harms, Arizonians for Gun Safety, and the Homicide Research Working Group (HRWG). She has worked with police departments and agencies nationwide in joint efforts to curb violence. In various capacities and roles, Pizarro has managed federally funded grants on urban violence and intimate partner homicide prevention awarded by the Bureau of Justice Assistance, Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, National Institute of Health, and the National Science Foundation. She is the editor-in-chief of Homicide Studies: An Interdisciplinary and International Journal.

Jennifer L. Pomeranz, JD, MPH, is an Assistant Professor in the College of Global Public Health at New York University. Her research focuses on public health law and policy. She is especially interested in policy and legal options to address the food environment, products that cause public harm, and social injustices that lead to health disparities. Ms. Pomeranz authored over fifty peer-reviewed and law review journal articles and a book, Food Law for Public Health, published by Oxford University Press in 2016. She was previously the Director of Legal Initiatives at the Yale Rudd Center for Food Policy & Obesity. Ms. Pomeranz is the Policy Chair of the Law Section of the American Public Health Association. She earned her Juris Doctorate from Cornell Law School and her Master of Public Health from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

Joe Popcun is a fellow at the Rockefeller Institute of Government. He previously served as executive director of the Regional Gun Violence Research Consortium and executive director of the New York State Council on Community Re-Entry and Reintegration.

Before his time at the Rockefeller Institute, Popcun served as the deputy commissioner for policy and planning at the New York State Division of Criminal Justice Services. In this role, he oversaw the agency’s strategic and policy initiatives as well as administration and finance areas. Prior to being deputy commissioner, he served as assistant secretary for public safety and policy advisor for public safety in the Office of New York State Governor Andrew M. Cuomo where he provided policy expertise and operations assistance for the state’s criminal justice, law enforcement, and homeland security agencies. Before state service, Popcun was a research analyst and academic fellow with the federal government as well as a research assistant with a nationally-recognized security research institute.

[email protected]

~ RGVRC Affiliate Scholar ~

Christian D. Pulcini, MD, MEd, MPH is a pediatric emergency physician at the University of Vermont Medical Center and UVM Children’s Hospital and an assistant professor of emergency medicine and pediatrics at the University of Vermont, Larner College of Medicine. His current areas of research foci are pediatric firearm injury, emergency care of children with medical complexity, and mental health. His firearm research to date focuses on longitudinal outcomes, healthcare utilization, and costs of firearm injury. He is the current leader of the Children’s Hospital Association Research in Gun-Related Events (CHARGE) firearm research group, which is a national collaboration of interdisciplinary researchers dedicated to pediatric firearm related research.

He attended Tufts University School of Medicine followed by pediatrics residency at Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh of UPMC and pediatric emergency medicine fellowship at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. He holds an M.Ed. in secondary education from Loyola Marymount University (former Teach for American corps member), and an M.P.H. in maternal and child health from Boston University School of Public Health. He is passionate about the intersection of research, public policy, and advocacy for children.

Lieutenant Colonel Dermot Quinn is a 35-year veteran of the Massachusetts State Police beginning his career in 1983. Lieutenant Colonel Quinn was promoted to Sergeant in 1994, Lieutenant in 2003, Captain in 2005, Major in 2006, and to his current rank in 2015.

Lieutenant Colonel Quinn has been assigned to various duty stations including Field Services, Information Technology Section, Narcotics Section, Attorney General’s State Police Detective Unit, Criminal Information Section and Commonwealth Fusion Center. He was promoted to Lieutenant Colonel and placed in charge of the Division of Investigative Services where he served for two years. In 2017 he was asked to serve as the Division Commander of the newly formed Division of Homeland Security and Preparedness, where he serves today.

Lieutenant Colonel Quinn is a graduate of the University of Massachusetts – Lowell where he earned his BS, MS, and MA. He sits on the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court’s Standing Committee on Eyewitness Evidence, Represents the State Police on the New England High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area (NEHIDTA) Executive Board and has attended the FBI’s Law Enforcement Executive Development Seminars (LEEDS) for chief executive officers of the nation’s mid-sized law enforcement agencies.

Kerri M. Raissian is an associate professor of public policy at the University of Connecticut. Her research focuses on child and family policy with an emphasis on understanding how policies affect fertility, family formation, and family violence. Raissian’s research is interdisciplinary and draws on principles from program evaluation, economic demography, and applied microeconomics.

Raissian is the co-director of UConn’s Gun Violence Prevention – Research Interest Group (GVP-RIG) and the co-leader of the Connecticut Chapter of the Scholars Strategy Network. Raissian also serves on Connecticut’s Commission for Community Gun Violence Prevention and Intervention  She was a Doris Duke Fellow for the Promotion of Child Well-Being and completed her doctoral degree in public administration at the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University in 2013.

Dr. Sonali Rajan is an associate professor of health education in the Department of Health and Behavior Studies at Teachers College, Columbia University. Dr. Rajan’s interdisciplinary research is focused on identifying patterns of risk behaviors among adolescent youth; implementing and evaluating school-based health education programs; and identifying environmental-level characteristics that influence health behaviors among urban youth and communities.  In line with the approach of the “whole child”, her research embraces a comprehensive definition of health, recognizing that the synergy between multiple health issues and the surrounding environment together inform long-term outcomes. For the past several years, Dr. Rajan has worked on the implementation and evaluation of health education and behavioral health initiatives aimed to mitigate youth engagement in high-risk behaviors and promote positive youth development, particularly in urban school and community spaces disproportionately impacted by health and educational inequities. She has a line of research in the area of aggression and violence prevention in schools and is focused on supporting efforts aimed at reducing the presence of firearms in K-12 school settings. Her long–term vision for the prevention of gun violence, particularly among urban youth, reflects the importance of assessing risk at a behavioral and environmental–level and in the role that programming in schools and communities can play in mitigating this level of risk alongside shifts in policy. Dr. Rajan graduate with her Bachelor of Science in Biological and Environmental Engineering from Cornell University, her Master of Science in Applied Statistics from Teachers College, Columbia University, and her Doctor of Education in Health and Behavior Studies also from Teachers College. From 2010 – 2012 she was a NIDA-funded postdoctoral fellow at the National Development and Research Institutes.

Bob Rakhmatullaev is a PhD student at the School of Criminal Justice, University at Albany, SUNY. His research interests include determinants of violence within organized crime groups, the experiences of violent hate crime victims, attitudes toward gun-carrying policies on college campuses, and the comparative analysis of gun ownership trends in rural versus urban settings. With clinical experience in reentry services, he has worked with inmates who have been victims and perpetrators of gun-related violence. Bob holds an MA in clinical psychology from Pennsylvania State University.

Megan L. Ranney MD MPH is an NIH-funded injury researcher, national leader in emergency care, and a practicing emergency physician at Rhode Island’s only Level I Trauma Center. She is Associate Professor in the Department of Emergency Medicine at Rhode Island Hospital/Alpert Medical School of Brown University. She is a core researcher in the Injury Prevention Center of Rhode Island Hospital. She has a secondary appointment in the Department of Health Services, Policy, and Practice at the Brown School of Public Health. She is also the Director and Founder of the Brown Emergency Digital Health Innovation program (www.brownedhi.org), as well as Director of Special Projects in the Department of Emergency Medicine.

Dr. Ranney’s career focus is on developing, testing, and disseminating digital health interventions for at-risk emergency department patients, focusing on those with a history of violence exposure and mental illness. She a history of research and national leadership on violence prevention, particularly firearm violence. She has worked with the American Medical Association, American Bar Association, the American College of Emergency Physicians, and the Massachusetts Attorney General’s office, among others, to develop evidence-based clinical approaches to firearm injury prevention.

She holds numerous national positions, including currently serving as Chief Research Officer of the American Foundation for Firearm Injury Reduction in Medicine (AFFIRM), as an elected member of the Board of Directors of the Society for Academic Emergency Medicine (SAEM), and as an editor for Annals of Emergency Medicine. Prior leadership roles include chairing the American College of Emergency Physician’s (ACEP) Technical Advisory Group on Firearm Injury; the ACEP Trauma and Injury Prevention Section; and the SAEM Research Committee and Public Health Interest Group. She has received national and local awards for her research, innovation, and community service.

Dr. Ranney graduated from Harvard University with a Bachelor of Arts (summa) in History of Science.  She served as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Cote d’Ivoire prior to attending medical school at Columbia University College of Physicians & Surgeons in NYC.  She graduated with AOA status and received the Leonard Tow Humanism in Medicine award on graduation. She completed internship, residency, and chief residency in Emergency Medicine, as well as a fellowship in Injury Prevention Research and a Master of Public Health, at Brown University.

~ RGVRC Affiliate Scholar ~

Ali Rowhani-Rahbar is the Bartley Dobb Professor for the Study and Prevention of Violence, professor of epidemiology, professor of pediatrics, and adjunct professor of policy and governance at the University of Washington, where he directs the Firearm Injury & Policy Research Program. He evaluates community-based interventions, social programs, and public policies for their impact on multiple forms of violence, with a particular emphasis on preventing firearm-related harm. Specifically, his work integrates data from the healthcare system, civil legal system, and criminal legal system to inform equitable actions focused on reducing the risk of firearm-related harm, particularly among minoritized communities. Rowhani-Rahbar has served on the Board of Scientific Counselors of the National Center for Injury Prevention and Control at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Board of the National Research Society for the Prevention of Firearm-Related Harms, Firearm Data Infrastructure Workgroup of the Safe States Alliance, Board of Directors for the Society for Advancement of Violence and Injury Research, Editorial Board of Injury Prevention, and as the Injury Epidemiology section editor of Current Epidemiology Reports. He received the University of Washington Distinguished Teaching Award in 2020 and the University of Washington School of Public Health Outstanding Faculty Mentor Award in 2023. He was elected to the National Academy of Medicine in 2023.

~ RGVRC Affiliate Scholar ~

Paul M. Reeping is a postdoctoral fellow in the Violence Prevention Research Program (VPRP) at University of California, Davis. He is an epidemiologist by training. He received his PhD from Columbia University, Mailman School of Public Health and his MS in epidemiology from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Reeping’s research focuses broadly on gun violence prevention, and can roughly be split into three categories: the causes and consequences of active mass and school shootings; the prevention of school-based violence; and the impact of gun-free zones and other sensitive-place based policies on gun violence prevention. Before pursuing epidemiology, Reeping was a tenth grade environmental science teacher in Chicago, which serves as an important influence and lens to his current work in gun violence prevention.

~ RGVRC Affiliate Scholar ~

Camerin “Cami” Rencken is a PhD candidate in the Department of Epidemiology at the University of Washington. She is interested in violence and injury epidemiology, focusing on using observational data for causal inference, community-engaged research, and policy evaluation. Her dissertation work employs a mix of quantitative and qualitative methods to understand the adverse mental health outcomes that result from mass school shootings. She earned a master of science in global public health from Brown University and a bachelor of science in global disease biology from the University of California, Davis.

Christen Rexing, PhD, MPH, is the executive director of the Society for Advancement of Violence and Injury Research (SAVIR). This professional organization provides leadership and fosters excellence in the science of violence and injury prevention and care. Rexing is a firearm injury prevention researcher, educator, and advocate with over 15 years of experience in the field and classroom. Her research focuses on health policy development, adoption, and evaluation, particularly at the state and federal levels. Her advocacy work includes education, outreach, and partner development. Before joining SAVIR as their executive director, she was a faculty member at La Salle University, working on curriculum development and winning awards in recognition of her teaching and partnership efforts.

As the executive director of SAVIR, she works to advance the organization’s mission, build partnerships to advance injury and violence prevention (IVP) work, advocate for funding and evidence-based practices and policies, design and support educational and network opportunities, and build the pipeline of IVP researchers. She engaged actively in several regional and national networks focused on IVP and gun violence prevention, such as Code Red, the College of Physicians of Philadelphia, the Injury & Violence Prevention Network, and Delaware County, Pennsylvania’s Vision Zero. Rexing maintains a connection to the classroom as an adjunct faculty member at the University of Pennsylvania. She also serves her local community as a township councilor.

Taylor Rodriguez, MS, is a fifth year PhD candidate in the clinical psychology program at Rutgers University and a research assistant at the New Jersey Gun Violence Research Center. Her research interests are primarily focused on factors that impact mental healthcare utilization and engagement, with specific work focused on those at high risk for firearm suicide. Rodriquez’s work has also focused on mental healthcare providers’ firearm injury prevention practices including screening for firearm access.

John K. Roman, Ph.D., is a senior fellow in the Economics, Justice, and Society Department and directs the Center for Public Safety and Justice at NORC at the University of Chicago.  His research focuses on the economics of innovative crime and justice policies and programs, cost-benefit methodology, and systems reforms, including justice system interactions with substance abuse, public health, adolescent development, housing, workforce development, and education. Dr. Roman has conducted research on behalf of numerous state and local governments, foundations, and federal agencies.

Dr. Roman is the author of What is the Price of Crime? New Estimates of the Cost of Criminal Victimization, the coeditor of two books, Cost-Benefit Analysis and Crime Control and Juvenile Drug Courts and Teen Substance Abuse, as well as dozens of scholarly articles and book chapters. Dr. Roman is an elected fellow of the Academy of Experimental Criminology, chairs the Crime Trends Workgroup at the Council on Criminal Justice, chairs the Federal Data Infrastructure workgroup at Safe States Alliance, is the co-chair of the National Prevention Science Coalition, and serves on the editorial board of Criminology and the Journal of Experimental Criminology. He served as an associate editor at the Journal of Experimental Criminology and taught in the graduate programs of criminology and government at the University of Pennsylvania and Georgetown University’s McCourt School of Public Policy. He holds a BA from Kenyon College, an MPP from the University of Michigan, and a PhD from the University of Maryland.

~ RGVRC Affiliate Scholar ~

Kelly Roskam, JD, is the director of law and policy at the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Violence Solutions. In this role, Kelly supports the development, advocacy, implementation, and defense of evidence-based firearm policy to save lives. Her work focuses in particular on Second Amendment doctrine, Extreme Risk Protection Orders, and the intersection of domestic violence and firearms.

Roskam received her BA in history and political science from the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, Minnesota, and her JD from the Pennsylvania State University–Dickinson School of Law.

~ RGVRC Affiliate Scholar ~

John “Jack” Rozel has worked in emergency mental health since 1990 and has been the medical director of resolve Crisis Services of the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC) Western Psychiatric Hospital since 2010. He is a past president of the American Association for Emergency Psychiatry, the leading national organization dedicated to the improvement of compassionate, evidence-based care for people with psychiatric emergencies. He divides his time between emergency psychiatry and violence work.

Rozel trains and consults with teams across UPMC and the country on violence and threat management projects, staff injury prevention, firearm injury prevention, and crisis and emergency psychiatry. Rozel is board-certified in general, child, and forensic psychiatry. He earned a bachelor’s in biomedical ethics and an MD at Brown University, and a master of studies in Law from the University of Pittsburgh. He completed his general psychiatry residency and child and forensic psychiatry fellowships at the Western Psychiatric Institute and Clinic of UPMC.

Rozel served as an incident commander for mass shootings and has been involved in the behavioral health response to several mass casualty events. He has contributed to major policy and practice efforts, including the National Council for Behavioral Health’s report on mass violence, the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline’s violence management guidelines, the Pennsylvania Governor’s Special Council on Gun Violence report, and the AMA et al.’s Amici brief for the Supreme Court NYSRPA v. Bruen case. Rozel is a Mental Health and Justice Advisory Committee member for the Pennsylvania Commission on Crime and Delinquency (PCCD). In conjunction with the PCCD, he receives funding from the US Department of Homeland Security’s Center for Prevention Programs and Partnerships to develop regional threat management partnerships in Western Pennsylvania. He serves on the Pennsylvania Special Council on Gun Violence and was recently appointed to the Citizens Law Enforcement Advisory and Review Commission.

~ RGVRC Affiliate Scholar ~

Bill Sandel, PhD, is an associate professor of criminology and criminal justice at Missouri State University (MSU). His research focuses on law enforcement tactics, the use of force, police training, and active shooter events. Sandel works with several agencies to provide research-based training throughout the state of Missouri. He runs a grant from the Missouri Office of Homeland Security to provide active shooter training statewide. Before working at MSU, Sandel served as the research specialist at the ALERRT Center at Texas State University and still works closely with the research department on several projects. Additionally, he is a certified instructor of the ALERRT Center’s Civilian Response to Active Shooter Events (CRASE) course.

Dr. Chethan Sathya, MD, MSc, is a pediatric trauma surgeon and National Institutes of Health (NIH) funded firearm injury prevention researcher. He serves as director of Northwell Health’s Center for Gun Violence Prevention and oversees the health system’s expansive approach to firearm injury prevention. Sathya was recently awarded $1.4 million from the NIH to study gun violence prevention and implement a first-of-its-kind protocol to universally screen among those at risk of firearm injury. The grant is part of the health system’s “We Ask Everyone. Firearm Safety is a Health Issue” research study, which aims to shift the paradigm to view gun violence as a public health issue and approach firearm injury risk similarly to other health risk factors. Sathya spearheaded the formation of the National Gun Violence Prevention Learning Collaborative for Hospitals and Health Systems, in which hospitals can learn about gun violence prevention from experts, develop best practices, and implement strategies to prevent firearm injuries. He is a powerful voice and advocate for firearm injury prevention. His role as a pediatric trauma surgeon in Chicago and New York has exposed him to the dramatic results of gun violence, fueling his passion to find solutions to the national issue.

Sathya is a part of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine Action Collaborative for preventing firearm-related violence and is a consultant to the American College of Surgeons Committee on Trauma for the National Firearm Injury Data Collection Initiative. Sathya is associate trauma director at Cohen Children’s Medical Center and assistant professor of Surgery and Pediatrics at the Donald and Barbara Zucker School of Medicine at Hofstra/Northwell. He completed medical school and general surgery training at the University of Toronto, followed by a Pediatric Surgery Fellowship at Northwestern Medicine in Chicago.

Wendy J. Schiller is an Alison S. Ressler professor of political science, professor of public & international affairs, and director of the A. Alfred Taubman Center for American Politics and Policy at Brown University. She earned her BA from the University of Chicago and her PhD in political science from the University of Rochester. Among the books she has authored or co-authored include Inequality Across State Lines: How Policymakers Have Failed Domestic Violence Victims in the United States (Cambridge University Press), Dynamics of American Democracy: Partisan Polarization, Political Competition and Government Performance (University of Kansas Press), Electing the Senate: Indirect Democracy before the Seventeenth Amendment (Princeton University Press), Gateways to Democracy: An Introduction to American Government (Cengage), The Contemporary Congress (Rowman & Littlefield), and Partners and Rivals: Representation in US Senate Delegations (Princeton University Press).

Schiller has also published articles in the American Journal of Political Science, The Forum, Journal of Politics, Journal of Women, Politics & Policy, Legislative Studies Quarterly, Perspectives on Politics, State Politics and Policy Quarterly, and Studies in American Political Development. Schiller has provided political analysis to MSNBC, NPR, CNN, and Bloomberg News. She also provides local political commentary to the Providence Journal, WPRO radio, and Rhode Island PBS’s A Lively Experiment. She is the political analyst for WJAR10, the local NBC affiliate in Providence, Rhode Island.

~ RGVRC Affiliate Scholar ~

Julia Schleimer is a social epidemiologist, PhD candidate in the Department of Epidemiology at the University of Washington School of Public Health, trainee with the University of Washington Firearm Injury & Policy Research Program, and research data analyst at the Violence Prevention Research Program at University of California, Davis. She holds an MPH in epidemiology with a concentration in the social determinants of health from Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health. Schleimer studies the effects of social and structural factors, community-based interventions, and social programs and policies on violence and related inequities, with particular emphasis on firearm harm. Schleimer applies critical, multilevel, and life course perspectives to her work.

Nathaniel Schutten is a PhD candidate in the School of Criminal Justice at the University at Albany and a lecturer in the Department of Criminal Justice at SUNY Plattsburgh. His research focuses on understanding the social determinants of gun ownership and gun attitudes, as well as their political implications. His secondary research interests include public opinion on punishment, criminal justice policy, and decarceration. Schutten primarily employs quantitative research methods, including surveys and survey experiments. His research has been published in peer-reviewed journals including, Criminology and Justice Quarterly.

Dr. Daniel Semenza is an assistant professor in the Department of Sociology, Anthropology, and Criminal Justice at Rutgers University – Camden. His research examines the causes and health-related consequences of gun violence in the United States. He also studies health disparities related to violent victimization and the criminal justice system. His work employs quantitative, spatial, and ecological methods and he has published his research in a wide range of peer-reviewed journals in criminology, public health, and sociology. Semenza is currently a faculty affiliate with the New Jersey Gun Violence Research Center, the Center for Urban Research and Education, and the Health Sciences Center at Rutgers University. He is also a researcher with the Health Criminology Research Consortium at Saint Louis University.

Dr. John Shjarback is an associate professor in the Department of Law and Justice Studies at Rowan University. His research broadly focuses on American policing with a specific interest in transactional gun violence between officers and citizens. It examines such transactional violence through a number of avenues and perspectives, including community/ecological correlates as well as organizational factors of police agencies. His peer-reviewed work has appeared in Injury Prevention, Criminology & Public Policy, and the Journal of Criminal Justice, among others. He has also written op-eds geared toward general public audiences for The Washington Post, the New York Daily News, The Dallas Morning News, and Smerconish.com. John’s work on use of force and officer-involved shootings informs data collection ventures and has been cited during legislative and agency efforts in Philadelphia, Utah, Georgia, New Jersey, and King County, Washington. He is the 2021 recipient of the “Early Career Award” from the American Society of Criminology’s Division of Policing.

Kaitlin N. Sidorsky is an associate professor of political science and public policy at Ramapo College of New Jersey. She earned her BA from Bryant University and her MA and PhD in political science from Brown University. Among the books she has authored or co-authored are Inequality Across State Lines: How Policymakers Have Failed Domestic Violence Victims in the United States (Cambridge University Press), All Roads Lead to Power: Appointed and Elected Paths to Public Office for U.S. Women (University Press of Kansas), and a forthcoming state government simulation textbook with Rowman & Littlefield. She has also published articles in the Journal of Women, Politics & Policy, Perspectives on Politics, State Politics and Policy Quarterly, and Political Research Quarterly. Sidorsky has provided political analysis to Bloomberg Law, the Brookings Institution, and the London School of Economics.

Dr. Michael Siegel is a Professor in the Department of Community Health Sciences at the Boston University School of Public Health. During his 21 years at the School, his main areas of research interest have been alcohol, tobacco, and firearms. Tying these issues together is the presence of powerful corporations that use sophisticated marketing, public relations, and lobbying activities to negatively impact the public’s health. In the tobacco area, Dr. Siegel has examined the impact of cigarette advertising on youth smoking behavior, the health effects of secondhand smoke, and the evaluation of policies to reduce youth smoking and encourage smoking cessation. In the alcohol field, he has examined the relationship between alcohol advertising and youth alcohol consumption at the brand level. Recently, he has initiated a program of research into firearms violence. In September 2013, he published an article in the American Journal of Public Health which examined the relationship between state-level gun ownership and firearm homicide rates throughout the United States during a 30-year period. This research found a strong correlation between increasing prevalence of gun ownership and higher firearm homicide rates. A subsequent paper, published in AJPH the following year, reported that this relationship between gun ownership and firearm homicide was only present for non-stranger homicide rates, not for stranger homicide rates. His current work focuses on examining the impact of state firearm laws on rates of firearm-related homicide and suicide, studying the role of gun culture in the epidemic of firearms violence, and exploring the effects of state-level firearm laws on homicide rates among African-American and Hispanic populations.

Dr. Jason R. Silva is an assistant professor in the Department of Sociology and Criminal Justice at William Paterson University. His research examines mass shootings, terrorism, school violence, and media coverage of crime. Silva recently developed the Global Mass Shooting Database to understand and compare perpetrator motivations and strategies for intervention and prevention. His recent publications have appeared in Aggression and Violent Behavior, American Journal of Criminal Justice, Criminal Justice Policy Review, International Criminal Justice Review, International Journal of Comparative and Applied Criminal Justice, Justice Quarterly, Journal of Interpersonal Violence, Security Journal, Studies in Conflict and Terrorism, Violence against Women, and Victims & Offenders. Silva has been a featured mass shooting and firearm violence expert for media outlets including CBS, Denver Post, NBC, Newsweek, and USA Today. His work has also appeared in CNN, New York Magazine, NPR, Oxygen, and The Conversation.

~ RGVRC Affiliate Scholar ~

Alexandra Slemaker, PhD, is an assistant professor in the Department of Criminal Justice at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and a research scholar for the Tourist Safety Institute. She earned her PhD in sociology at Iowa State University. Her interdisciplinary research uses qualitative and quantitative methodologies to examine mass murder, specifically mass shootings and domestic terrorism. Slemaker’s work aims to understand the societal, psychological, motivational, and ideological factors that influence a perpetrator to commit mass violence and ways that can be used to create prevention strategies. She also studies the safety and security of places and spaces, particularly schools, universities, and public areas. Slemaker’s research has been published in peer-reviewed journals including, American Journal of Criminal Justice, International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, and Journal of Threat Assessment & Management.

She was previously employed at the University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center, where she participated in research and clinical work in child clinical psychology. She was involved in several federal and state-funded grants for youth with problematic sexual behavior and the prevention of child maltreatment. Her research on these topics has been published in journals such as Child Abuse & Neglect, Journal of Pediatric Psychology, and Qualitative Psychology.

~ RGVRC Affiliate Scholar ~

Justin Sola is a PhD candidate at the University of California, Irvine’s Criminology, Law & Society program. His research focuses on how and why people become interested in guns. Sola uses preregistered experiments (forced-choice conjoint and vignette), longitudinal designs (smartphone-delivered surveys), semi-structured interviews, participant observation, and topic modeling. Sola’s current projects include investigating how socioeconomic hardship affects the desire for guns and assessing how gun ownership affects neighborhood socialization. His work has been recognized by the 2023-24 Haynes Fellowship, the 2022-23 National Collaborative on Gun Violence Research Award, the 2022-23 UC Irvine Public Impact Fellowship, and the 2018-23 Social Ecology Arnie Binder Fellowship.

Sola also researches inequality in the criminal justice system through fieldwork on the “Shadow Costs” project (funded by the National Institute of Justice, National Science Foundation, the Russell Sage Foundation, and the Haynes Foundation) and as a member of the Irvine Laboratory for the Study of Space and Crime. Before entering the PhD program, Sola earned a bachelor’s in social studies from Harvard, writing a senior thesis on how police and gun owners idealized gun ownership.

~ RGVRC Affiliate Scholar ~

Layla Soliman, MD, is board-certified in general and forensic Psychiatry and is a clinical assistant professor at Advocate Health/Wake Forest University School of Medicine. She completed medical school at the Medical College of Ohio in Toledo (2005), followed by a psychiatry residency and forensic psychiatry fellowship at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center-Western Psychiatric Institute and Clinic.

Soliman moved to Charlotte, North Carolina, in 2017 to join Atrium Health (now Advocate), where she works primarily as an adult inpatient psychiatrist. Additionally, she has led quality improvement projects related to risk assessment/mitigation. Her experiences as a forensic psychiatrist have made her passionate about proactive, therapeutic risk mitigation. This especially extends to partnering with patients and families to reduce the risk of firearm injuries.

Robert J. Spitzer (Ph.D., Cornell University, 1980) is a distinguished service professor and chair of the Political Science Department at SUNY Cortland. He is the author of fifteen books, including five on gun policy, most recently GUNS ACROSS AMERICA (Oxford University Press 2015).

Gun Law History in the United States and Second Amendment Rights

New York State and the New York SAFE Act: A Case Study in Strict Gun Laws

~ RGVRC Affiliate Scholar ~

Ian Stanley, PhD, is an assistant professor in the Department of Emergency Medicine at the University of Colorado (CU) School of Medicine. He is also the military and veteran lead for the CU Firearm Injury Prevention Initiative (FIPI) and the psychological health lead for the CU Anschutz Center for Combat Medicine and Battlefield (COMBAT) Research.

As a licensed clinical psychologist, his research centers on preventing firearm suicide, particularly among military service members and first responders. Stanley’s work seeks to prevent posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in these populations. He has published over 140 peer-reviewed scientific publications, and his work has received grant funding from the US Department of Defense, the National Institute of Mental Health, the Military Suicide Research Consortium, the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, and the New Jersey Gun Violence Research Center. Numerous media outlets, including The New York Times, Forbes, Bloomberg News, and The Today Show, have featured Stanley’s work. Recognized as a leader in the field, he serves on the editorial boards of two of the flagship journals of the American Psychological Association: Psychological Services and Psychological Trauma: Theory, Research, Practice, and Policy.

Dr. Richard Stansfield is an associate professor of criminal justice at Rutgers University–Camden. His research focuses on violence prediction and prevention broadly. That includes assessment and prediction of homicide, community violence, and intimate partner violence. He has also contributed to several grant-funded violence prevention projects and evaluations. Additional research interests include risk and protective factors related to recidivism and reentry from prison.  He has published widely on these topics, including in Criminology, Justice Quarterly, Criminal Justice & Behavior, American Journal of Public Health, and Preventive Medicine.

~ RGVRC Affiliate Scholar ~

Christopher Strain is a professor of History & American Studies at the Harriet L. Wilkes Honors College of Florida Atlantic University. His research interests include civil rights, hate crime, and violence. He is the author of four books: Pure Fire: Self-Defense as Activism in the Civil Rights Era (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2005), Burning Faith: Church Arson in the American South (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2008), Reload: Rethinking Violence in American Life (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2010), and The Long Sixties: America, 1955-1973 (New York: Wiley-Blackwell, 2016).

In addition to his books, he has published work in edited volumes and journals, including The American Historical Review, The Journal of American History, The Journal of Southern History, The Journal of African American History, The Journal of Civil and Human Rights, The Journal of Hate Studies, The Florida Historical Quarterly, and The Journal of Florida Studies. He has presented papers at numerous regional, national, and international conferences, including one at Centre de Recherches sur l’Histoire des Etats-Unis (CRHEU) at the University of Paris.

He was twice named Researcher of the Year at FAU, in 2011 and in 2006, when he also participated in an NEH Summer Institute at the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute at Harvard University. He has been awarded grants and fellowships from agencies such as the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the William R. Kenan Charitable Trust, the Florida Department of Education, and the Florida Humanities Council. He serves on the editorial board of The Journal of Civil and Human Rights at the University of Illinois Press. He is also founding co-director of the Kenan Social Engagement Program, a scholarship program that pairs students with nonprofit organizations while teaching them about social entrepreneurship and mentoring them in starting their own social ventures.

Jay Szkola is an assistant professor in the Department of Law and Justice Studies at Rowan University. He received his PhD in criminal justice from CUNY John Jay College/The Graduate Center and received his MSW from New York University. His main research interests are in community violence intervention (CVI) programs, credible messengers, spatial crime patterns, and gun culture. Prior to becoming a faculty member at Rowan University, Jay was the data scientist at Everytown for Gun Safety. He currently has several active research projects including ones looking at emerging gun culture, the implementation of CVI programs, and what makes Credible Messengers Credible. His work has appeared in peer-reviewed journals such as Justice Quarterly, Criminal Justice and Behavior, Journal of Urban Health, and Crime & Delinquency.

Elizabeth Tobin-Tyler, JD, MA, is an associate professor of health services, policy and practice at the Brown University Schools of Public Health, Family Medicine and Medical Science within the Warren Alpert Medical School of Brown University. She teaches in the areas of health justice, public health law and ethics, health policy, and reproductive rights and justice. Her research and writing focus on the structural and legal determinants of health and health inequities, public health law and policy, women’s health, reproductive justice, and family violence.

Tobin-Tyler edited Poverty, Health, and Law: Readings and Cases for Medical-Legal Partnership and co-authored with Joel Teitelbaum Essentials of Health Justice: Law, Policy and Structural Change, 2nd Edition (Jones and Bartlett Learning, 2022). Her scholarship has been published in multiple journals, including The New England Journal of Medicine, American Journal of Public Health, American Journal of Preventive Medicine, Public Health Reports, The Lancet, Health Affairs, The Harvard Journal of Health and Human Rights, Journal of Legal Medicine, and the Journal of Law, Medicine and Ethics.

She holds a BA and MA from the University of Texas at Austin and a JD from Northeastern University School of Law. She was a public policy fellow at the A. Alfred Taubman Center for American Politics and Policy, a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Public Health Law Education faculty fellow, and a fellow at the Law, Health, Justice Centre at the University of Technology in Sydney, Australia.

Dr. Tracy’s research focuses on understanding the interrelations between violence, mental health, and substance use. She uses novel methods, like agent-based modeling, to identify optimal strategies to reduce violence and its consequences in the population. She is particularly interested in the transmission of violence, including gun violence, across different types of social relationships (e.g., from parent to child, between romantic partners, between peers), and the role of mental health, substance use, and economic opportunity in those transmission patterns. She is currently leading an NIH-funded study of the biological, behavioral, and social processes that contribute to violence transmission.

Jennifer Tucker is a professor of history at Wesleyan University and the founding director of Wesleyan’s Center for the Study of Guns and Society, established in 2022 as a hub for pioneering interdisciplinary research, teaching, and annual conferences on firearms history.

Tucker is an expert on the history of firearms, technology, law, violence, and culture. Her research explores the history of firearms as industrial, commercial products, as well as the history of firearms engineering, design, and ballistics lethality. She also conducts historical research on the labor, manufacturing, and environmental impacts of firearms manufacture; state gun regulations in the 18^th and 19^th centuries; and global gun violence, public health, and policy.

Tucker coedited the book, A Right to Bear Arms? The Contested Role of History in Contemporary Debates on the Second Amendment (Smithsonian Institution Scholarly Press, 2017), which has been cited in amicus briefs and Supreme Court opinions. She has written widely in academic and media outlets, including CNN, The Washington Post, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Conversation, and MSNBC, about current debates over the history of the Second Amendment.

She engages nationally and internationally with museum professionals on gun-history related public history projects and is a member of the American Historical Association and National Council on Public History. She is a former Marshall Scholar, Fulbright Senior Scholar in the UK, and a senior research associate at the Science Museum in London, and her research has been recognized and supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Mellon Foundation, and the Social Science Research Council.

~ RGVRC Affiliate Scholar ~

Jillian Turanovic is an associate professor and director of the Crime Victim Research and Policy Institute in the College of Criminology and Criminal Justice at Florida State University. Her research focuses on violent victimization, youth development, school violence, and mass shootings. She is the author of Thinking About Victimization: Context and Consequences (Routledge, 2019) and Confronting School Violence: A Synthesis of Six Decades of Research (Cambridge University Press, 2022). The Office for Victims of Crime, the National Institute of Justice, the National Science Foundation, and Arnold Ventures have supported her work. Turanovic’s research appears in journals such as Criminology, Justice Quarterly, Journal of Quantitative Criminology, Journal of Adolescent Health, and the Journal of Pediatrics. In 2015, she received her PhD in criminology and criminal justice from Arizona State University.

~ RGVRC Affiliate Scholar ~

Dr. Laura Vargas is an assistant professor of psychiatry at the University of Colorado School of Medicine. She is funded by the National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities (NIMHD) and researches exposure to trauma and mental health of recent Latinx immigrants in the United States. Dr. Vargas focuses on understanding how phenotypes of depression, anxiety, and PTSD are shaped by traumatic experiences, individual characteristics, and symptom severity among Latinx adult immigrants. She is a Mexican/American bicultural researcher and clinician focused on mental health and health service utilization among Latinx populations. Previously, she studied the relationship between widespread community violence and healthcare service access and utilization in Mexico, including working with the country’s Ministry of Social Policy. She is affiliated with the Firearm Injury Prevention Initiative at the University of Colorado School of Medicine and the University of Colorado Boulder Population Center and the Institute for Behavioral Science; and was selected as a 2024 Health Disparities Research Institute Scholar by NIMHD. She is an advisory council member for the University of Michigan Injury Prevention Center and is a member of the Issue Advisory Committee for the Nationwide Public Awareness and Education Campaign Aimed at Reducing Firearm Deaths, Injuries and Impact of Gun Violence on Youth in America by the Ad Council. Dr. Vargas received her MPA (International and Public Affairs), MSW, and Ph.D. (Social Work) from Columbia University.

Pina Violano is a clinical associate professor and director of community engagement at Quinnipiac University’s School of Nursing. She previously served as manager of the Injury & Violence Prevention Program at Yale’s Adult & Pediatric Level 1 Trauma Centers. She has longstanding leadership and expertise in reducing unintentional and intentional injuries through the development and implementation of effective evidenced-based injury prevention strategies on a local, state, and national level that, in 2007, led to the designation of Injury Free Coalition for Kids of New Haven for which she served as the program director and principal investigator for over 12 years. Her collaboration with street-based outreach worker programs and victim service providers to reduce gun and community violence within Connecticut’s highest violent communities culminated in the creation of Connecticut’s first hospital-based violence intervention program (HVIP).

Dr. Violano has extensive experience in leading community-based participatory research efforts to reduce gun-related injuries and death through local, statewide, and national gun buy-back programs and the promotion of safe storage of firearms events. In 2017, she cofounded Swords to Plowshares Northeast, a nonprofit violence prevention organization that provides jobs and opportunities for youth to make positive impacts in their communities as well as repurposes guns from gun buybacks into gardening tools, which are distributed to local community gardens. In August 2021, she was sought out by The Commission on Women, Children, Seniors, Equity, & Opportunity (CWCSEO) of the Connecticut General Assembly and appointed as the advisory fellow and primary administrator for Connecticut’s Gun Violence Intervention & Prevention Advisory Committee, which led to Connecticut’s Commission on Community Gun Violence Intervention and Prevention.

Matt Vogel, PhD, is an associate professor in the School of Criminal Justice at the University at Albany, SUNY, and also holds faculty affiliations with the Department of Sociology and the Center for Social and Demographic Analysis. His research has explored various topics, highlighting the nuanced pathways through which social environments, including schools and residential neighborhoods, affect youth development, and behavior. Vogel has a long-standing interest in the role of population dynamics in shaping long-term trends in crime and justice. His research in this area points to the importance of population age structure, and cohort dynamics for understanding racial disparities in violence, justice involvement, and long-term incarceration trends. His research has appeared in Criminology, Quantitative Criminology, Social Forces, Annual Review of Criminology, and Demography, among other outlets. Prior to joining the University at Albany’s faculty, Vogel was a faculty member in the Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice at the University of Missouri-St. Louis, where he served in advisory roles for the St. Louis Violence Prevention Commission, the St. Louis Area Hospital-Based Violence Intervention Program, and the Mayor’s Criminal Justice Coordinating Council. He remains actively involved in collaborative efforts to reduce the impact of gun violence in St. Louis communities.

~ RGVRC Affiliate Scholar ~

Dr. Julie Ward is a board-certified advanced public health nurse and assistant professor of medicine, health, and society and public policy studies at Vanderbilt University. Her research examines entrenched and emerging threats or responses to community safety interests, with an emphasis on the role of firearms, public policy, and other structural determinants, as well as the experiences and perspectives of affected groups. Methodologically, she employs epidemiologic analyses of novel datasets, mixed methods study designs, and advanced analytic strategies for policy analysis.

Notably, Dr. Ward is the lead researcher on a series of nationally comprehensive studies of fatal and nonfatal shootings by police in the US. This first-of-its-kind research grew from her team’s detailed review of more than 15,000 shootings nationally, an ongoing effort that she oversees. Other research led by Dr. Ward has been cited in the US Congressional hearings on “Evaluating the Federal Bureau of Prisons’ Pandemic Response” and “Upgrading Public Health Infrastructure.” Her in-progress studies include a county-level mixed methods evaluation of Extreme Risk Protection Orders in Florida.

Dr. Ward completed her PhD at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, Department of Health Policy & Management, in affiliation with the Center for Gun Violence Solutions. She also holds a master of nursing degree in community health systems, specializing in occupational and environmental health, from the University of Washington. Her research is informed by more than 15 years of practice as a registered nurse in emergency department, employee health, community-based case management, and health promotion programming roles.

Devon Ziminski is a doctoral research fellow at New Jersey’s Gun Violence Research Center (NJGVRC) and a PhD candidate in the School of Social Work at Rutgers University. Her research focus areas are community violence program evaluation, differences in urban/rural gun violence, relationships between gun violence, community connection, neighborhood cohesion, and asset-based community-informed research practices. Her research involves direct engagement with community partners and local and state governments on primary and secondary data collection, analysis, and program evaluation projects.

Ziminski works as a senior research project administrator at the Senator Walter Rand Institute for Public Affairs (WRI) at Rutgers University – Camden.  Prior to joining WRI, she worked in various roles at the Malcolm Wiener Center for Social Policy and the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation at the Harvard Kennedy School. Ziminski holds a bachelor’s degree from The College of New Jersey and a master’s degree from the University of Pennsylvania.