Jaclyn Schildkraut, PhD, is the executive director of the Regional Gun Violence Research Consortium and 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. Since 2018, she has conducted the largest study in the nation on the effects of lockdown drills on school participants and skill mastery, and she consults with school districts to help improve their emergency response plans. She has also conducted and published research examining the impacts of mass shootings on survivors and was consulted by Canada’s Mass Casualty Commission charged with investigating the April 2020 mass casualty event in Nova Scotia. Schildkraut recently published research examining law enforcement’s perspective of armed teacher policies and a case study of the Parkland school shooting using the Path to Intended Violence model to identify opportunities for intervention and new policy solutions.

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, forthcoming). 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, forthcoming). She has also published more than 30 scholarly articles on topics related to mass and school shootings 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).

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.

Dr. Michael Anestis is the Executive Director of the New Jersey Gun Violence Research Center and an Associate Professor of Urban-Global Public Health at Rutgers University.  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).

Dr. Nazsa Baker earned her PhD in urban systems with a concentration in urban health from Rutgers University, School of Nursing in October 2021. She also holds an MA in health advocacy from Sarah Lawrence College and a dual BA in anthropology and psychology from Bates College. Currently, she is a postdoctoral fellow with the New Jersey Gun Violence Research Center at Rutgers University, School of Public Health. Her research focuses on community violence, with an emphasis on firearm violence survivorship and adverse lifespan experiences among violently injured Black males and hospital-based violence intervention programs (HVIPs). She also examines the importance of culturally congruent quantitative questionnaires for Black populations. Baker is passionate about bringing the voices to those overlooked to the forefront in her research and she does this by employing qualitative methodologies. She uses qualitative methods to evaluate participant and program outcomes in hospital-based violence intervention programs. In addition, she grounds her research in community-based participatory research (CBPR) to ensure she is partnering with communities. Overall, Baker is invested in understanding the lives of violently injured Black males who are treated at Level I and II trauma centers.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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

~ 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 ~

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.

Saul Cornell is the Paul and Diane Guenther Chair in American History at Fordham University, a former Professor of history at Ohio State University and the former Director of the Second Amendment Research Center at the John Glenn Institute. He received a PhD from the University of Pennsylvania in 1989 and is now one of the nation’s leading authorities on early American constitutional thought. He is the author of two prize-winning works in American legal history. His work has been widely cited by legal scholars, historians, and has been cited by the U.S. Supreme Court and several state supreme courts. Professor Cornell has also been a leading advocate of using new media to teach history and is the author of a new American history text book, Visions of America.

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.

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.

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.

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.  

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.

~ RGVRC Affiliate Scholar ~

Lisa Geller is the state affairs advisor at the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Violence Solutions, a Center housed in the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Lisa’s work focuses on research, advocacy, and implementation of evidence-based gun violence prevention policies, including extreme risk protection orders and domestic violence protective orders. Lisa is also a mayoral appointee on the District of Columbia’s Domestic Violence Fatality Review Board. Lisa 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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

Matthew Lacombe received his PhD from Northwestern University. Lacombe is an assistant professor of political science at Barnard College, Columbia 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.

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).

~ 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.

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.

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.

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]

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

~ 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.

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.