Mike Anestis is the executive director of the New Jersey Gun Violence Research Center and a professor of urban-global public health in the School of Public Health at Rutgers. 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).