Nicholas Simons leads the Regional Gun Violence Research Consortium, which aims to reduce violence involving firearms through research and analysis. He also specializes in education policy research and data visualization, writing pieces on K-12 and higher education topics for the Institute and building interactive graphics for Institute reports. He previously served as policy analyst for SUNY Central Administration’s Office of Government Relations, and as special assistant to the president at the University at Albany.

Mr. Simons received his bachelor’s in political science and master’s in public administration from the University at Albany.

[email protected]

Romain Alexander is a Policy Advisor for the Office of Governor John Carney. Romain has over 30 years of progressive leadership experience with municipal government. His work is centered on developing and integrating innovative strategies to reduce gun violence in the State of Delaware.

Romain’s focus is on identifying the potential predictors of being involved in gun violence and developing a data-driven system to provide the proper wrap-around services to individuals and families in need.

Romain co-leads the Delaware Criminal Justice Reform Project. This initiative is designed to reduce recidivism through the application of evidence based practices targeting primary criminogenic risk factors. The reform project also focuses on the mental health and substance use disorder populations.

Romain is the recipient of numerous community service awards for his work with youth throughout the State of Delaware. He also serves on the board of several non-profit and community based organizations.

Romain received his BA in Personnel Administration from the University of Kansas.

Biography forthcoming

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.

Rod K. Brunson is Dean and Professor in the School of Criminal Justice at Rutgets University. His research examines youths’ experiences in neighborhood contexts, with a specific focus on the interactions of race, class, and gender, and their relationship to criminal justice practices. His work appears in the British Journal of Criminology, City & Community, Criminology, Criminology & Public Policy, Fordham Urban Law Journal, Justice Quarterly, and Urban Affairs Review.

Joel Capellan, assistant professor of Law & Justice Studies, has conducted and published research on mass public shootings, lone wolf terrorism, policing bias, state-sponsored repression, segregation, and criminal and sociological theories. He has constructed a data base of mass public shootings in the nation from 1960-2014. His research includes demographic information on offenders and victims, as well as incident-level data on preparation, execution and conclusion of attacks. His 2016 dissertation at City University of New York (John Jay College of Criminal Justice) was titled “Looking Upstream: A Sociological Investigation of Mass Public Shootings.” He joined Rowan in 2016.

Publications include:

2018 Silva, J., & Capellan, J.A. The Media’s Coverage of Public Mass Shootings: An Analysis of Fifty Years of Newsworthiness. International Journal of Comparative and Applied Criminal Justice.

2018 Capellan, J.A., Gomez, S. Change and Stability in Offender, Behaviors, and Incident-level Characteristics of Mass Public Shootings in the United States. Journal of Investigative Psychology and Offender Profiling.

2017 Porter, J., Capellan, J.A., & Howell, F. Re-Operationalizing Open Country: Introducing a Place-Level Geography for the Study of Rural Crime. International Journal of Applied Geospatial Research

2015 Osborne, J.R. & Capellan, J.A. “Examining Active Shooter Events through the Rational Choice Perspective and Crime Scene Analysis.” Security Journal

2015 Capellan, J.A. “Lone Wolf Terrorist or Deranged Shooter? A Study of Ideological Active Shooter Events in the U.S., 1970-2014.” Studies in Conflict and Terrorism

Biography forthcoming

Biography forthcoming

Michaela Dunne is the Manager of Law Enforcement & Justice Services 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.

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 U.S.  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 U.S. Department of Justice in its investigation of the Ferguson (Missouri) Police Department.

Margaret K. Formica, MSPH, PhD is an assistant 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.

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.  

Sandro Galea, a physician and an epidemiologist, is dean and Robert A. Knox Professor at Boston University School of Public Health. He previously held academic and leadership positions at Columbia University, the University of Michigan, and the New York Academy of Medicine. Dr Galea’s scholarship has been at the intersection of social and psychiatric epidemiology with a focus on the behavioral health consequences of trauma, including firearms. He has published more than 700 scientific journal articles, 50 chapters, and 13 books, and his research has been featured extensively in current periodicals and newspapers. His latest book, Healthier: Fifty Thoughts on the Foundations of Population Health was published by Oxford University Press in 2017.

Galea holds a medical degree from the University of Toronto and graduate degrees from Harvard University and Columbia University. He also holds an honorary doctorate from the University of Glasgow. Galea was named one of Time magazine’s epidemiology innovators, and has been listed as one of the “World’s Most Influential Scientific Minds”. He is past president of the Society for Epidemiologic Research and of the Interdisciplinary Association for Population Health Science. He is an elected member of the National Academy of Medicine and the American Epidemiological Society. Galea has received several lifetime achievement awards for his research, including the Rema Lapouse Award from the American Public Health Association and the Robert S. Laufer Memorial Award from the International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies. He is a regular contributor to Fortune magazine and has published widely in the lay press, including the Wall Street Journal, Harvard Business Review, the Boston Globe, and The New York Times. His research has been cited by these publications as well as BBC, Slate, WBUR, and NPR, among others.

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.

Christopher Herrmann is an assistant professor in the Law and Police Science Department at CUNY John Jay College of Criminal Justice (NYC). He earned his PhD at the CUNY Graduate Center in New York City, specializing in crime analysis and crime mapping.

Dr. Herrmann is a former crime analyst supervisor with the New York City Police Department where he focused on short-term and long-term gun violence and homicide trends, including crime prevention and control strategies, officer and resource allocation, and research of other crime trends throughout New York City.

His current research interests include the study of crime at micro-levels using GIS and spatiotemporal relationships between neighborhood socioeconomic factors, business, and crime. He is currently working on the complex relationships between gun violence and other violent crimes within NYC public housing developments.

Dr. Bernadette Hohl is an Assistant Professor at RU-SPH. She also holds an appointment in the School of Criminal Justice. Her research employs mixed methods, community based participatory research approaches and epidemiological study designs to examine the influence of social and physical neighborhood factors on youth violence and risk. Dr. Hohl’s current research focuses on developing and testing community interventions to address those factors. Dr. Hohl is part of several community and academic partnerships working to address issues facing urban, minority, and disadvantaged communities. She has established collaborative, working relationships with key municipal, community and academic stakeholders to conduct community engaged projects to reduce violence. She is a site PI on a CDC funded, multi-city study evaluating the effect of community and youth-engaged vacant property stabilization on violence, property crimes and intentional injuries among youth. She has published in high impact, peer reviewed journals and presented to national and international audiences on various aspects of violence risk and prevention. 

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.

Dr. Jackson is an Assistant Professor in the College of Emergency Preparedness, Homeland Security, and Cybersecurity at the University at Albany. His research focuses on American far-right extremism, online extremism, and methods and tools for studying online extremism. He also studies how political activists use social media to pursue their political goals, with a focus on activism around guns in America. Publications include a forthcoming article in Terrorism and Political Violence and a report for the Program on Extremism at George Washington University. Dr. Jackson has also been a visiting researcher with VOX-Pol, an EU-funded network of excellence on violent online political extremism.

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.

Biography forthcoming

Craig H. Kennedy became Provost on April 2, 2018. Previously, Provost Kennedy served as Dean of the College of Education at the University of Georgia. A native of California, he earned his BA in psychology from the University of California at Santa Barbara and his MS in special education from the University of Oregon, and returned to UC Santa Barbara to earn his Ph.D. in education.

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. 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.

Alan Lizotte is Distinguished Professor and former Dean of the School of Criminal Justice*, University at Albany.  He is co-principal investigator on the Rochester Youth Development Study, an ongoing thirty year study of three generations of 1,000 families in Rochester, New York.  He has published more than seventy papers in scholarly journals and six books including Gangs and Delinquency in Developmental Perspective with colleagues that won the American Society of Criminology (ASC) book award in 2003.  He is a fellow of the ASC and received the University at Albany President’s award for Excellence in Research.  Among many other activities in 1989 he addressed the Committee of the Whole for the California General Assembly regarding Automatic Weapons and 1998 consulted with Janet Reno, Attorney General of the U.S. on school shootings.  He specializes in developmental criminology, youth violence, firearms and public policy.

Patricia Logan-Greene, MSSW, Ph.D., is an Assistant 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).

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.

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. Dr. 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. Dr. 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.

Dr. 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, Dr. 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. Dr. 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.

Daniel O’Connell, PhD is a Senior Scientist at the Center for Drug and Health Studies and Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology & Criminal Justice at the University of Delaware. He specializes in applications of criminological theory, with a focus on desistance from criminal and addiction careers. His main research areas are focused on drug addiction and violence, correctional practice, prisoner reentry, drug treatment and corrections, with a special focus on research methodologies and statistical applications in criminal justice.

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 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.

Dr. Pridemore is Dean of and Professor in the School of Criminal Justice at University at Albany – State University of New York. He received his PhD in 2000 from Albany and spent 2003-2004 as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Harvard in the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies. In 2008, Dr. Pridemore received the Junior Scholar Award from the American Sociological Association’s Section on Alcohol, Drugs, and Tobacco; in 2009 he received Indiana University’s Trustees Teaching Award; in 2012 he received the Radzinowicz Memorial Prize for his research on poverty, inequality, and national homicide rates; and in 2015 he received the Gerhard O.W. Mueller Award for Distinguished Contributions to International Criminal Justice from the Academy of Criminal Justice Science’s International Section and the Freda Adler Distinguished Scholar Award from the American Society of Criminology’s Division of International Criminology for significant contributions to international criminology over the course of his career. He is a founding Editorial Board member of the new Annual Review of Criminology, the American Society of Criminology’s liaison to the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and was the Founding Director of Indiana University’s Workshop in Methods.

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.

Biography forthcoming

Dr. Sonali Rajan is an Assistant 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.

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.

Jaclyn Schildkraut, PhD is an associate professor of Criminal Justice at the State University of New York (SUNY) at Oswego. Her research interests include mass/school shootings, homicide trends, mediatization effects, moral panics, and crime theories.

She is the co-author of Mass Shootings: Media, Myths, and Realities and editor/contributor of the forthcoming (June 2018) book Mass Shootings in America: Understanding the Debates, Causes, and Responses.  She has published in a number of journals, including Homicide Studies, American Journal of Criminal Justice, Journal of Qualitative Criminal Justice & Criminology, Fast Capitalism, Criminal Justice Studies, Crime, Law and Social Change, and Criminology, Criminal Justice, Law & Society, as well as several edited volumes.

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.

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

Biography forthcoming

Dr. Sean Varano is a Professor in the School of Justice Studies at Roger Williams University. Dr. Varano’s area of expertise are in law enforcement policy and practice, innovative approaches to violence reduction, youth gangs, and evaluation research. Dr. Varano is an active collaborator with local communities implementing and evaluating evidence-based approaches to crime and public health. He has served as the Local Action Research Partner to the New Bedford Police Department for their Shannon Community Safety Initiative since 2006. Dr. Varano was co-principal investigator/evaluator for the City of Providence’s Project Safe Neighborhoods (PSN) gang reduction program funded through the U.S. Department of Justice, and the Olneyville Housing Corporations (OHC) U.S. Department of Justice funded Byrne Criminal Justice Innovation grant program. Dr. Varano has also worked extensively with the cities of New Bedford and Brockton (Massachusetts) in their state funded efforts to reduce the prevalence of intentional prescription drug misuse. Dr. Varano is a 2002 graduate of Michigan State University (Ph.D.) and previously worked for the U.S. Department of Justice’s Office of Community-Oriented Policing Services (COPS Office).