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 MSPH in epidemiology from the Arnold School of Public Health at the University of South Carolina and her PhD in epidemiology from Boston University School of Public Health.

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 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. 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.

Bryce Hruska, PhD, investigates the mental health consequences of traumatic life events like violent injury or motor vehicle crashes. His research has evolved from understanding individual-level outcomes to examining the upstream community-level conditions that shape where trauma occurs. His foundational work with traumatic injury survivors—many of whom experienced gun violence—considered the acute psychosocial, behavioral, and physiological factors that contribute to longer-term mental health problems following injury. This work has expanded to include emergency medical service clinicians—the providers who administer first-line medical care to injury survivors—examining dynamic risk and protective factors associated with their mental health. At the community level, his NIH-funded research has moved upstream to examine neighborhood profiles defined by features of the built and social environment and their relationships with violent injury disparities. This work adopts a public health lens to understand violent injury as shaped by environmental context rather than individual risk factors alone. Dr. Hruska is an associate professor of public health at Syracuse University’s Maxwell School and a faculty research affiliate of the Lerner Center for Public Health Promotion. He received his PhD in experimental health psychology with a minor in quantitative methods from Kent State University.

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

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