~ RGVRC Affiliate Scholar ~

Justin Sola is a PhD candidate at the University of California, Irvine’s Criminology, Law & Society program. His research focuses on how and why people become interested in guns. Sola uses preregistered experiments (forced-choice conjoint and vignette), longitudinal designs (smartphone-delivered surveys), semi-structured interviews, participant observation, and topic modeling. Sola’s current projects include investigating how socioeconomic hardship affects the desire for guns and assessing how gun ownership affects neighborhood socialization. His work has been recognized by the 2023-24 Haynes Fellowship, the 2022-23 National Collaborative on Gun Violence Research Award, the 2022-23 UC Irvine Public Impact Fellowship, and the 2018-23 Social Ecology Arnie Binder Fellowship.

Sola also researches inequality in the criminal justice system through fieldwork on the “Shadow Costs” project (funded by the National Institute of Justice, National Science Foundation, the Russell Sage Foundation, and the Haynes Foundation) and as a member of the Irvine Laboratory for the Study of Space and Crime. Before entering the PhD program, Sola earned a bachelor’s in social studies from Harvard, writing a senior thesis on how police and gun owners idealized gun ownership.