~ RGVRC Affiliate Scholar ~

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

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

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