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.