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Contagion of Violence: Workshop Summary (2013)

Chapter: Appendix C: Speaker Biographical Sketches

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Suggested Citation:"Appendix C: Speaker Biographical Sketches." Institute of Medicine and National Research Council. 2013. Contagion of Violence: Workshop Summary. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/13489.
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Appendix C

Speaker Biographical Sketches

Zainab Al-Suwaij is a co-founder of the American Islamic Congress (AIC) and has been its executive director since its inception in 2001. In the wake of the 9/11 terror attacks, Ms. Al-Suwaij left her teaching position at Yale University to launch AIC with the mission of building interfaith and interethnic understanding and to represent the diversity of American Muslim life. Over the past decade, Ms. Al-Suwaij’s leadership has expanded AIC into an international organization with bureaus worldwide, including the United States, Egypt, Iraq, and its newest location, Tunisia. Under her direction, AIC has trained hundreds of young Middle Eastern activists in the methods of nonviolent protest and social media mobilization, empowering them to take on regimes during the Arab Spring. In Iraq, she launched a program that disrupts and mediates tribal and sectarian violence as it happens, saving dozens of lives in Basra and Baghdad. Ms. Al-Suwaij’s vision for acceptance and understanding in the United States is being realized through AIC’s growing campus initiative, Project Nur, as well as its Interfaith Councils and groundbreaking Witness Series. Ms. Al-Suwaij is an outspoken advocate for women’s equality, civil rights, and interfaith understanding. She has briefed Congress and the White House and has been invited to speak at numerous panel events, universities, and think tanks. Ms. Al-Suwaij has published editorials in the three largest American newspapers: New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and USA Today. She has appeared on NPR, BBC, Al-Jazeera, CBS, ABC, MSNBC, CNN, and Fox. Named an “Ambassador of Peace” by the Interreligious and International Peace Council, Ms. Al-Suwaij has received Dialogue on Diversity’s Liberty Award and was recognized as “2006 International Person of the Year” by

Suggested Citation:"Appendix C: Speaker Biographical Sketches." Institute of Medicine and National Research Council. 2013. Contagion of Violence: Workshop Summary. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/13489.
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the National Liberty Museum. Raised in Basra, Iraq, Ms. Al-Suwaij fled the country after participating in the 1991 uprising against Saddam Hussein and is now a U.S. citizen living in the Washington, DC, area.

Carl C. Bell, M.D., a clinical professor of psychiatry and public health, is the director of the Institute for Juvenile Research (IJR) at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC). IJR is a century-old, multimillion-dollar academic institute providing child and family research, training, and service, employing 257 academic faculty and support staff. Dr. Bell is also the president and chief executive (CEO) of Community Mental Health Council & Foundation, Inc., in Chicago, a large multimillion dollar comprehensive community mental health center employing 390 social service experts. Over 40 years, he has published more than 450 articles, chapters, and books on mental health and authored The Sanity of Survival. He has been interviewed by Ebony, Jet, Essence, Emerge, New York Times, Chicago Tribune Magazine, People Magazine, Chicago Reporter, Nightline, ABC News, National Public Radio, CBS Sunday Morning, the News Hour with Jim Lehrer, the Tom Joyner Morning Show, Chicago Tonight, and the Today show. A graduate of UIC, he earned his M.D. from Meharry College in Nashville. In 2011, Dr. Bell received the American Psychiatric Association’s annual Solomon Carter Fuller Award at Institute on Psychiatric Services. He completed his psychiatric residency in 1974 at the Illinois State Psychiatric Institute/IJR in Chicago.

Patrick Burton, M.Sc., H.Dip., is the executive director of the Centre for Justice and Crime Prevention (CJCP), a Cape Town—based nongovernmental organization engaged in the field of social justice and crime prevention, with a particular focus on children and youth. He has undertaken work in the security; HIV/AIDS and health; information and communications technology; and small business sectors. He previously worked for the National Department of Provincial and Local Government, as well as to the National Department of Communications. While at CJCP, Mr. Burton has worked on the first national youth victimization study to be conducted in South Africa, youth resilience to violence study, a national school violence baseline study, and a cyber-violence pilot study. Other more recent projects undertaken include explorations into the causes and nature of youth violence, and intensive work into the extent and nature of school violence in South Africa and the region. He has undertaken work in Bangladesh, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Ethiopia, India, Malawi, Mozambique, Namibia, South Africa, South Sudan, and Tanzania. Mr. Burton is a postgraduate development researcher, having graduated from the University of the Witwatersrand with a higher diploma in development planning, and from the University of KwaZulu-Natal (Durban) with an M.S. in development studies, with a gender focus.

Suggested Citation:"Appendix C: Speaker Biographical Sketches." Institute of Medicine and National Research Council. 2013. Contagion of Violence: Workshop Summary. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/13489.
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Jacquelyn C. Campbell, Ph.D., R.N. (Planning Committee Member), is the Anna D. Wolf chair and professor at the Johns Hopkins University (JHU) School of Nursing, with a joint appointment in the Bloomberg School of Public Health and one of the inaugural Gilman Scholars at JHU. She is also the national program director of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Nurse Faculty Scholars program. Dr. Campbell has been conducting advocacy policy work and research in the area of violence against women since 1980, with 12 major federally funded research grants and more than 220 articles and 7 books. She is an elected member of the Institute of Medicine (IOM) of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS), and the American Academy of Nursing as well as chair of the Board of Directors of Futures without Violence. She served on the Department of Defense (DoD) Task Force on Domestic Violence and has provided consultation to the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), World Health Organization (WHO), and U.S. Agency for International Development, She received the National Friends of the National Institute of Nursing Research Research Pathfinder Award, the Sigma Theta Tau International Nurse Researcher Award, and the American Society of Criminology Vollmer Award for advancing justice. Dr. Campbell co-chaired the Steering Committee for the WHO multi-country study on Violence Against Women and Women’s Health. She has been appointed to three IOM/NAS Committees evaluating evidence in various aspects the area of violence against women, and currently serves on the IOM Board on Global Health and co-chairs the IOM Forum on Global Violence Prevention. She is also a member of the Fulbright Specialist Roster and does work in collaboration with shelters, governments, criminal justice agencies, schools of nursing, and health care settings in countries such as Australia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Haiti, New Zealand, South Africa, and Spain.

Eric F. Dubow, Ph.D., is professor of clinical and developmental psychology at Bowling Green State University and an adjunct research scientist at the University of Michigan’s Institute for Social Research. His research and writings on stress and coping in adolescents were some of the first to illuminate the role that the child’s coping and family and community resources play in promoting resilience, while his longitudinal research on the development of aggression has demonstrated the long-term detrimental consequences of early aggressiveness in youth. His recent longitudinal studies of Palestinian and Israeli youth have shown how war violence promotes both interpersonal violence and posttraumatic stress symptoms in youth exposed to the war violence. Professor Dubow is currently associate editor of Developmental Psychology and bulletin editor for the International Society for Research on Aggression. He also participates on National Institutes of

Suggested Citation:"Appendix C: Speaker Biographical Sketches." Institute of Medicine and National Research Council. 2013. Contagion of Violence: Workshop Summary. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/13489.
×

Health (NIH) review panels for risk and protective factors. He is a member of the American Psychological Association, Society for Research in Child Development, Society for Research on Adolescence, and International Society for Research on Aggression. He obtained his undergraduate degree at Columbia University and his Ph.D. at UIC.

Jeffrey Fagan, Ph.D., is the Isidor and Seville Sulzbacher Professor of Law and professor of epidemiology at Columbia University, and director of the Center for Crime, Community and Law at Columbia Law School. He also is a senior scholar at Yale Law School. His research and scholarship examines policing, the legitimacy of the criminal law, capital punishment, legal socialization of adolescents, neighborhoods and crime, and juvenile crime and punishment. He served on the Committee on Law and Justice of the NAS from 2000 to 2006. From 1996 to 2006, he was a member of the MacArthur Foundation’s Research Network on Adolescent Development and Juvenile Justice. He is a founding member of the National Consortium on Violence Research, the Working Group on Legitimacy and the Criminal Law of the Russell Sage Foundation, and the Working Group on Incarceration at Russell Sage. From 2002 to 2005, he was a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Health Policy Research Fellow. He is past editor of the Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency, and serves on the editorial boards of several journals on criminology and law. He is a fellow of the American Society of Criminology.

Jason Featherstone, director for Surviving Our Streets, director of Violence Prevention with The Safety Box, and lead founder for the Chaos Theory organization, is committed to the reduction of street-related violence in the United Kingdom. Born to Guyanese parents in 1979, Featherstone’s first home from the hospital was a squat on the Woodberry Down estate, north London, moving shortly thereafter to a flat in Tottenham. Making the transition from victim to offender to practitioner, he has a grounded insight into the world to which so many of our young people succumb. Having grown up in Tottenham, the area that was the focal point for the UK 2011 riots, he experienced many of the issues facing the youth of today in inner-city London. Unfortunately these experiences included the loss of a number of friends and a cousin to gun and knife violence. The recent London riots hit very close to home for Featherstone. The footage of Allied Carpets, a local landmark, burning to the ground, was a stark reminder of the tensions that exist in Tottenham and indeed throughout the most deprived areas in London. Once the violence took root, the transmission from area to area, inclusive of neighboring communities with gang rivalries, was swift and fierce. In 2008 he received a commendation from the Home Office Violent Crime Directorate. He was selected for the pioneering Bravehearts program,

Suggested Citation:"Appendix C: Speaker Biographical Sketches." Institute of Medicine and National Research Council. 2013. Contagion of Violence: Workshop Summary. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/13489.
×

a Home Office initiative. As 1 of 12 youth leaders selected to take part in the weeklong development program in the Scottish Black Isles, he was pushed to his limits in the survival setting and tasked with conceptualizing new responses to knife and gun violence.

Brian W. Flynn, Ed.D., M.A. (Planning Committee Member) is a consultant, writer, trainer, and speaker specializing in preparation for, response to, and recovery from, the psychosocial aspects of large-scale emergencies and disasters. He has served numerous national and international organizations, states, and academic institutions. In addition, he currently serves as associate director of the Center for the Study of Traumatic Stress, and adjunct professor of psychiatry, department of psychiatry, Uniformed Services University of Health Sciences, in Bethesda, Maryland. In 2002, he left federal service as a rear admiral/assistant surgeon general in the U.S. Public Health Service. He has directly operated, and supervised the operation of, the federal government’s domestic disaster mental health program (including terrorism), programs in suicide and youth violence prevention, child trauma, refugee mental health, women’s and minority mental health concerns, and rural mental health. He has served as an advisor to many federal departments and agencies, states, and national professional organizations. He is recognized internationally for his expertise in large-scale trauma and has served as an advisor to practitioners, academicians, and government officials in many nations. He received his B.A. from North Carolina Wesleyan College, his M.A. in clinical psychology from East Carolina University, and his Ed.D. in mental health administration from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.

Deborah Gorman-Smith, Ph.D., is a senior research fellow at Chapin Hall and principal investigator and director of the Chicago Center for Youth Violence Prevention, 1 of 10 National Academic Centers of Excellence funded by the CDC. Her program of research, grounded in a public health perspective, is focused on advancing knowledge about development, risk, and prevention of aggression and violence, with specific focus on minority youth living in poor urban settings. Dr. Gorman-Smith has been or is now is principal or co—principal investigator on several longitudinal risk and prevention intervention studies funded by the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health & Human Development (NICHD), National Institute on Drug Abuse, CDC, Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA), and the W.T. Grant Foundation. Dr. Gorman-Smith has published extensively in areas related to youth violence, including the relationships among community characteristics, family functioning, and aggression and violence, including partner violence, and the impact of family-focused preventive interventions. She also serves as senior

Suggested Citation:"Appendix C: Speaker Biographical Sketches." Institute of Medicine and National Research Council. 2013. Contagion of Violence: Workshop Summary. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/13489.
×

research fellow with the Coalition for Evidence Based Policy, a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization whose mission is to promote government policy based on rigorous evidence of program effectiveness. She currently serves on the board of directors for the Society for Prevention Research, in addition to her service on other national, state, and university committees. She served as a visiting scholar at the Joint Center for Poverty Research at Northwestern University/University of Chicago. Dr. Gorman-Smith received her Ph.D. in clinical-developmental psychology at UIC.

Madelyn Gould, Ph.D., M.P.H., is a professor in psychiatry and epidemiology, and deputy director of research training in child psychiatry at Columbia University. Dr. Gould’s research interests include the epidemiology of youth suicide and the evaluation of suicide prevention interventions across the age span. Her participation in U.S. national government commissions includes the 1978 President’s Commission on Mental Health, the 1989 Secretary of HHS’s Task Force on Youth Suicide, and the Surgeon General’s 1999 National Suicide Prevention Strategy. She contributed to the CDC’s community response plan for suicide clusters (1988) and recommendations to optimize media reporting of suicide (1994), and more recently contributed to www.reportingonmedia.org. The recipient of the Shneidman Award for Research from the American Association of Suicidology in 1991, the New York State Office of Mental Health Research Award in 2002, the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention Research Award in 2006, and the New York State Suicide Prevention Center’s Excellence in Suicide Prevention Award in 2011, Dr. Gould has a strong commitment to applying her research to program and policy development.

Tio Hardiman, M.A., director for CeaseFire Illinois and creator of the Violence Interrupter Initiative, has dedicated his life and career to community organizing for peace and social change. In 1999, Mr. Hardiman joined CeaseFire, an award-winning public health model that has been scientifically proven to reduce shootings and killings. In 2008, under Mr. Hardiman’s direction, CeaseFire received additional funding from the State of Illinois to immediately expand from 5 to 15 communities and from 20 to 130 Outreach Workers and Violence Interrupters. Today, CeaseFire has been replicated in 15 Chicago communities, 7 cities in Illinois, 15 cities nationwide, England, Iraq, and South Africa. In addition, more than 30 cities and 20 nations concerned about their own levels of shootings and killings have expressed interest in learning more about the model. The Interrupters documentary based on Mr. Hardiman’s work has won film festivals across the nation. The Interrupters was released in theaters across the nation in 2011. Growing up in Chicago’s notorious Henry Horner Housing Projects, Mr. Hardiman witnessed firsthand the devastating effect the violence epidemic

Suggested Citation:"Appendix C: Speaker Biographical Sketches." Institute of Medicine and National Research Council. 2013. Contagion of Violence: Workshop Summary. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/13489.
×

has on a community. From that early exposure, he committed himself to ending violence in Chicago. Before joining CeaseFire, Mr. Hardiman organized more than 100 block clubs to strategize community plans for public safety on behalf of the Chicago Alliance for Neighborhood Safety and held leadership positions for Bethel New Life and Chicago’s CAPS Program. He holds a bachelor’s degree in liberal arts from Northeastern University and a master’s degree in inner city studies.

L. Rowell Huesmann, Ph.D., M.S. (Planning Committee Chair), is the Amos N. Tversky Collegiate Professor of Psychology and Communication Studies and director of the Research Center for Group Dynamics at the University of Michigan’s Institute for Social Research. He is also editor of the journal Aggressive Behavior and past president of the International Society for Research on Aggression. His research over the past 40 years has focused on the psychological foundations of aggressive and violent behavior and on how predisposing personal factors interact with precipitating situational factors to engender violent behavior. This research has included several life span longitudinal studies showing how the roots of aggressive behavior are often established in childhood. One particular interest has been investigating how children learn through imitation and how children’s exposure to violence in the family, schools, community, and mass media stimulates the development of their own aggressive and violent behavior over time. He has conducted longitudinal studies on the effects of exposure to violence at multiple sites in the United States as well as in Finland, Israel, Palestine, and Poland. These studies have shown that simply seeing a lot of violence (political violence, family violence, community violence, media violence) in childhood changes children’s thinking and perceptions, and increases the risk of interpersonal aggressive behavior later in life. He has also conducted research showing that interventions that change children’s beliefs about the appropriateness of conflict and aggression can be effective in preventing aggression. In 2005, Dr. Huesmann was the recipient of the American Psychological Association’s award for Distinguished Lifetime Contributions to Media Psychology.

Marco Iacoboni, M.D., Ph.D., is a neurologist and neuroscientist originally from Italy. Currently, he is professor of psychiatry and biobehavioral sciences at the David Geffen School of Medicine at University of California, Los Angeles, and director of the Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation laboratory of the Ahmanson-Lovelace Brain Mapping Center. Dr. Iacoboni investigates the neural basis of sensory-motor integration, imitation, and social learning. In particular, Dr. Iacoboni pioneered the research on the human mirror neuron system and its role in social behavior and learning, and its disorders. Dr. Iacoboni’s research has been funded by the NIH and the

Suggested Citation:"Appendix C: Speaker Biographical Sketches." Institute of Medicine and National Research Council. 2013. Contagion of Violence: Workshop Summary. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/13489.
×

National Science Foundation. He describes the research on mirror neurons for the general reader in his recent book Mirroring People: The Science of Empathy and How We Connect with Others.

Patrick W. Kelley, M.D., Dr.P.H., joined the IOM in 2003 as the director of the Board on Global Health. He has subsequently also been appointed the director of the Board on African Science Academy Development. Dr. Kelley has overseen a portfolio of IOM expert consensus studies and convening activities on subjects as wide ranging as the evaluation of the U.S. emergency plan for international AIDS relief (PEPFAR); the U.S. commitment to global health; sustainable surveillance for zoonotic infections; cardiovascular disease prevention in low- and middle-income countries; interpersonal violence prevention in low- and middle-income countries; and microbial threats to health. He also directs a unique capacity-building effort, the African Science Academy Development Initiative, which over 10 years aims to strengthen the capacity of eight African academies to provide independent, evidence-based advice to their governments on scientific matters. Prior to coming to the NAS, Dr. Kelley served in the U.S. Army for more than 23 years as a physician, residency director, epidemiologist, and program manager. In his last DoD position, Dr. Kelley founded and directed the DoD Global Emerging Infections Surveillance and Response System. This responsibility entailed managing surveillance and capacity-building partnerships with numerous elements of the federal government and with health ministries in over 45 developing countries. He also founded the DoD Accession Medical Standards Analysis and Research Activity. Dr. Kelley is an experienced communicator having lectured in English or Spanish in more than 20 countries. He has published more than 65 scholarly papers, book chapters, and monographs. Dr. Kelley obtained his M.D. from the University of Virginia and his Dr.P.H. in epidemiology from the Johns Hopkins School of Hygiene and Public Health. He is also board-certified in preventive medicine and public health.

Barry A. Krisberg, Ph.D., is the research and policy director of the Chief Justice Earl Warren Institute on Law and Social Policy at the University of California, Berkeley, Law School. He is also a lecturer in residence in the Juris Doctor Program at Berkeley Law and was recently a visiting scholar at John Jay College in New York City. He is known nationally for his research and expertise on juvenile justice issues and is often called on as a resource for professionals, foundations, and the media. Dr. Krisberg was appointed by the legislature to serve on the California Blue Ribbon Commission on Inmate Population Management. He has served on almost all major statewide task forces on California corrections issues over the past 20 years. He is past president and fellow of the Western Society of Criminology and was the chair of the California Attorney General’s Research Advisory

Suggested Citation:"Appendix C: Speaker Biographical Sketches." Institute of Medicine and National Research Council. 2013. Contagion of Violence: Workshop Summary. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/13489.
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Committee. In 1993 he was the recipient of the August Vollmer Award, the American Society of Criminology’s most prestigious award. The Jessie Ball duPont Fund named him the 1999 Grantee of the Year for his outstanding commitment and expertise in the area of juvenile justice and delinquency prevention. In 2009, he received special recognition by the Annie E. Casey Foundation for his contributions to the Juvenile Detention Alternatives Initiative. Dr. Krisberg was appointed to chair an Expert Panel to investigate the conditions in the California youth prisons. In 2004, he was named in a consent decree to help develop remedial plans and to monitor many of the mandated reforms in the California Division of Juvenile Justice. He has also assisted the Special Litigation Branch of the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) on Civil Rights of Institutionalized Persons Act investigations. He has been retained by the New York State Office of Children and Family Services to assist in juvenile justice reforms. Dr. Krisberg received his master’s degree in criminology and a doctorate in sociology, both from the University of Pennsylvania.

Valerie Maholmes, Ph.D., is the program director for the Child and Family Processes/Maltreatment and Violence Research Program in the Child Development and Behavior Branch at the NICHD. In this capacity she provides scientific leadership on research and research training relevant to normative development in children from the newborn period through adolescence, and on the impact of specific aspects of physical and social environments on the health and psychological development of infants, children, and adolescents. Specifically, she supports research that addresses the public health, justice, social services, and educational problems associated with childhood and adolescent exposure to violence, as well as studies examining the trajectories that may lead to antisocial behavior, conduct problems, and aggression. In addition, Dr. Maholmes’ program includes a focus on the antecedents and consequences of child abuse and neglect as well as psychosocial and psychobiological factors that shed light on the mechanisms by which child abuse and neglect result in harmful effects. A goal of her program is to support the development theory-driven prevention and intervention approaches that reduce the risk for maltreatment and ameliorate its effects on child development. More recently, Dr. Maholmes initiated a funding opportunity calling for research on children in military families to examine whether there are long-term consequences of military deployment and reintegration on child and family functioning. She serves on several federal interagency working groups addressing cross-cutting issues related to child and adolescent development, vulnerable children in low- to middle-income countries, teen data violence, bullying, and behavioral and social sciences research. She is currently the co-chair of the NIH Child Abuse and Neglect Working Group. Before joining the NICHD, Dr. Maholmes was a faculty member at the

Suggested Citation:"Appendix C: Speaker Biographical Sketches." Institute of Medicine and National Research Council. 2013. Contagion of Violence: Workshop Summary. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/13489.
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Yale Child Study Center where she served in numerous capacities, including director of research and policy for the School Development Program, and was named the Irving B. Harris assistant professor of child psychiatry. In 2003, Dr. Maholmes was awarded the Executive Branch Science Policy Fellowship sponsored by the Society for Research in Child Development and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Iris PrettyPaint, Ph.D., is the Native Aspirations project director at Kauffman & Associates, Inc., headquartered in Spokane, Washington. Native Aspirations is funded by SAMHSA to provide national training and technical assistance to 65 American Indian and Alaskan Native villages to reduce violence, bullying, and suicide among youth. The Native Aspirations project contributes to a nationwide tribal movement toward healing, violence prevention, and positive youth development. Dr. PrettyPaint provides administrative oversight for an 11-member team to conduct data-driven community prevention planning, build community coalitions, and the implement evidence, practice, and culture-based interventions. Dr. PrettyPaint has more than 30 years of experience as an educator, researcher, and evaluator. She is a leading authority on cultural resilience, student retention, and indigenous evaluation, and her publications address issues of traditional native culture and resilience, family support models, cultural and school partnerships, and indigenous theoretical foundations on educational persistence. She has delivered training and technical assistance on a variety of topics, such as historical trauma, bullying, cultural resilience, youth leadership, substance abuse, post-vention, curriculum development, indigenous research methods, student retention, and sustainability.

Anita Raj, Ph.D., is a professor in the division of global public health, department of medicine and a senior fellow in the Center for Global Justice at the University of California, San Diego, as well as an adjunct professor of medicine at Boston University. Trained as a developmental psychologist, she has 20 years of experience conducting research on sexual and reproductive health/HIV/sexually transmitted infections, gender-based violence and inequities, substance misuse and abuse, and the intersection of these issues. Her current research is based in North America, Russia, and South Asia. This work includes qualitative and quantitative research to support intervention development and implementation, as well as efficacy and effectiveness trials to evaluate behavioral interventions. Dr. Raj has served as principal investigator or co-principal investigator on more than 30 grants from various federal funding agencies, including the NIH, CDC, SAMHSA, Office of Minority Health, and Packard Foundation; she has authored or co-authored more than 100 peer-reviewed publications from these efforts. Her research on gender-based violence has focused on

Suggested Citation:"Appendix C: Speaker Biographical Sketches." Institute of Medicine and National Research Council. 2013. Contagion of Violence: Workshop Summary. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/13489.
×

culturally specific and contextual vulnerabilities to violence among vulnerable populations for women. She has published research on the intersection of immigration-related abuse (e.g., threats of deportation, withholding of documentation papers) with spousal violence against immigrant women in the United States, as well as the role of immigration laws in reinforcing this intersection. This work was used to support change of the Violence Against Women Act to support better protections for non-U.S.-born victims of gender-based violence, including the development of the U-Visa, which protects women victims who were in the United States on spousal dependent visas. Over the past 5 years, Dr. Raj has focused her research on understanding girl child marriage (marriage prior to age 18), its intersection with gender-based violence, and its impact on maternal and child health globally. She has been working with various international organizations (e.g., the Elders and Girls Not Brides, UNICEF) to increase recognition of this issue as a global public health concern disproportionately affecting sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia and contributing to issues of HIV and maternal and infant mortality in these regions. In addition to her research, Dr. Raj has for the past 20 years been involved with various governmental committees and nongovernmental and community-based organizations working and advocating for immigrant rights, gender equity and violence prevention, and reproductive rights.

John A. Rich, M.D., M.P.H., is professor and chair of health management and policy at the Drexel University School of Public Health. He has been a leader in the field of public health, and his work has focused on serving one of the nation’s most ignored and underserved populations—African—American men in urban settings. In 2006, Dr. Rich was granted a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship. In awarding this distinction, the Foundation cited his work to design “new models of health care that stretch across the boundaries of public health, education, social service, and justice systems to engage young men in caring for themselves and their peers.” Prior to Drexel University, Dr. Rich served as the medical director of the Boston Public Health Commission. As a primary care doctor at Boston Medical Center, Dr. Rich created the Young Men’s Health Clinic and initiated the Boston HealthCREW, a program to train inner city young men to become peer health educators who focus on the health of men and boys in their communities. In 2009, Dr. Rich was inducted into the IOM. His recently published book about urban violence, Wrong Place, Wrong Time: Trauma and Violence in the Lives of Young Black Men, has drawn critical acclaim. He earned his Dartmouth A.B. degree in English, his M.D. from Duke University Medical School, and his M.P.H. from the Harvard School of Public Health. He completed his internship and residency at the Massachusetts General Hospital and was a fellow in general internal medicine at

Suggested Citation:"Appendix C: Speaker Biographical Sketches." Institute of Medicine and National Research Council. 2013. Contagion of Violence: Workshop Summary. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/13489.
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Harvard Medical School. He received an honorary doctor of science degree from Dartmouth in 2007 and now serves on its board of trustees.

Fariyal Ross-Sheriff, Ph.D., is a graduate professor and the director of Ph.D. program in social work at Howard University. Her area of specialization is displaced populations. These populations include two major groups—internationally: refugees, immigrants, and undocumented migrants, and within the United States: the homeless and disaster victims. Within displaced populations Dr. Ross-Sheriff’s work emphasizes women, children, and the elderly. Dr. Ross-Sheriff has worked extensively with Muslim refugees in Pakistan to examine the challenges facing refugees and service providers, and in Afghanistan to facilitate the repatriation and resettlement of refugees. In addition, she has conducted research on the role of women in the repatriation process. She has conducted training for service providers and made several presentations at conferences on refugee issues in countries of first asylum and different aspects of adaptation of refugees and immigrants to the United States. She serves as the editor in chief for Affilia: Journal of Women and Social Work, and a member on the editorial boards of Social Thought, Affilia, Journal of Immigrant and Refugee Services, and Social Development Issues. Among her many publication are articles on women issues; two co-edited books, Mental Health and People of Color: Curriculum Development and Change, Howard University Press, 1983, and Social Work Practice with Asian Americans, Sage Publications, Inc., 1992; and a co-authored monograph titled Muslim Refugees in the United States. Her current research focuses on transnational research on women in post-war situations and living in ultra-poverty. With Dr. R.A. English, she has developed the M.S.W. degree—level specialization in social work with displaced populations. She has taught in this specialization area for more than 20 years.

Gary Slutkin, M.D. (Planning Committee Member), is a physician and epidemiologist, an innovator in violence reduction, and the founder/executive director of Cure Violence (formerly known as CeaseFire), a scientifically proven, health approach to violence reduction using disease control methods. Cure Violence has now been statistically validated to reduce shootings and killings by two independent evaluations conducted by the DOJ and CDC, respectively, in multiple communities in Chicago and Baltimore. Dr. Slutkin applied lessons learned from more than a decade fighting epidemics in Africa and Asia to the creation of a public health model to reduce violence through behavior change and disease control methods. He is an Ashoka Fellow, a professor of epidemiology and international health at the University of Illinois at Chicago, a senior advisor to the WHO, and the 2009 winner of the Search for a Common Ground Award. Dr. Slutkin

Suggested Citation:"Appendix C: Speaker Biographical Sketches." Institute of Medicine and National Research Council. 2013. Contagion of Violence: Workshop Summary. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/13489.
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received his M.D. from the University of Chicago Pritzker School of Medicine, and did his internship and residency at San Francisco General Hospital (SFGH). He served as chief resident at SFGH and did his infectious disease fellowship there. He then became director of the Tuberculosis Control for the City of San Francisco (1981-1985), where he learned infectious disease control methods, and then moved to Somalia to work on tuberculosis, cholera and as counterpart to the National Director of Primary Health Care Program for Somalia (1985-1987). He then worked for the World Health Organization (1987-1994) reversing epidemics, including being principally responsible for supporting Uganda’s AIDS program—the only country to have reversed its AIDS epidemic. Dr. Slutkin was also responsible for setting up the HIV sentinel surveillance system for monitoring country and global trends in HIV, running the intervention development unit at WHO, and setting up the country programs for the 13 countries in the epicenter of the AIDS epidemic for the WHO Global Program on AIDS. Dr. Slutkin’s work was featured in Studs Terkel’s Will the Circle Be Unbroken, profiled in Blocking the Transmission, a New York Magazine cover story by bestselling author Alex Kotlowitz, and represented in the award-winning documentary The Interrupters.

Evelyn P. Tomaszewski, M.S.W. (Planning Committee Member), is a senior policy advisor within the Human Rights and International Affairs Division of the National Association of Social Workers (NASW), where she directs the NASW HIV/AIDS Spectrum Project. The project is a multi-phase, federally funded project based on a training of trainer model that develops provider capacity—through training, education, and technical assistance—to better address the clinical practice and policy issues relevant to the range of health and behavioral health issues of living with HIV/AIDS and co—occurring chronic illnesses. Ms. Tomaszewski promotes the NASW Global HIV/AIDS Initiative in collaboration with domestic and international groups and agencies, implements capacity and training needs assessment addressing the social welfare workforce, volunteers, and psychosocial care providers in sub-Saharan Africa, and serves as technical advisor in a USAID-funded Twinning Project with the Tanzania Social Work Associations. She staffs the National Committee on Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Issues and previously staffed the International Committee and Women’s Issues Committee. Ms. Tomaszewski has expertise in policy analysis and implementation addressing gender equity, violence prevention, and early intervention, and the connection of trauma and risk for HIV/AIDS and other sexually transmitted infections. She has more than two decades of social work experience as a counselor, advocate, educator, and program administrator. Ms. Tomaszewski is a member of the IOM Forum on Global Violence Prevention. She holds a B.S.W. and an M.S.W.

Suggested Citation:"Appendix C: Speaker Biographical Sketches." Institute of Medicine and National Research Council. 2013. Contagion of Violence: Workshop Summary. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/13489.
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from West Virginia University, and a graduate certificate in procurement and contracts management and a certificate in leadership development from the University of Virginia.

Robert J. Ursano, M.D., is professor of psychiatry and neuroscience and chair of the department of psychiatry at the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences and founding director of the Center for the Study of Traumatic Stress. He is widely published in the areas of posttraumatic stress disorder and public health planning for the psychological effects of terrorism, bioterrorism, traumatic events, and disasters, including war. Dr. Ursano has more than 300 publications, is the co-author or editor of 8 books and is editor of Psychiatry: Interpersonal and Biological Processes and senior editor of the first Textbook of Disaster Psychiatry (Cambridge University Press), which was published in 2007. He was the first chair of the American Psychiatric Association’s Committee on Psychiatric Dimensions of Disaster. Dr. Ursano chaired the development of the first APA’s Treatment Guidelines for Post-traumatic Stress Disorder and Acute Stress Disorder. He has received the DoD Humanitarian Service Award and the highest award of the International Traumatic Stress Society, the Lifetime Achievement Award, for “outstanding and fundamental contributions to understanding traumatic stress.” He is the recipient of the William C. Porter Award from the Association of Military Surgeons of the United States.

Jeffrey Victoroff, M.D., conducts two areas of research: behavioral neurology and political psychology. With regard to the first career, he studies the neurobehavioral bases of human aggression and behavioral complications of traumatic brain injury. He has published in multiple peer-reviewed journals, is a member of the Research Committee of the American Neuropsychiatric Association, and is a program director of the National Football League’s Neurologic Care Program. With regard to the second career, Dr. Victoroff studies individual factors and evolutionary imperatives that may predispose to violent extremism. He serves on the UN Roster of Terrorism Experts and has edited two books on this subject: Tangled Roots: Social and Psychological Factors in the Genesis of Terrorism (2006) and, with Arie Kruglanski, Psychology of Terrorism: Classic and Contemporary Insights (2009). His latest work for the U.S. Government’s Strategic Multilayer Assessment Program was titled Applied Evolutionary Neurobehavior to Reduce Participation in al-Qa’ida in the Arabian Peninsula. Dr. Victoroff received his B.A. magna cum laude in great books from St. John’s College, his master’s degree in social science from the University of Chicago, and his M.D. with honors from Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine. He completed his residency in psychiatry at Harvard’s McLean Hospital and his residency in neurology at the Harvard Longwood Medical

Suggested Citation:"Appendix C: Speaker Biographical Sketches." Institute of Medicine and National Research Council. 2013. Contagion of Violence: Workshop Summary. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/13489.
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Area neurology program. He completed his fellowship in neurobehavior at the University of California, Los Angeles. Since then he has been a member of the faculty of the University of Southern California Keck School of Medicine, where he now serves as associate professor of clinical neurology and psychiatry. He is board-certified both in neurology and in psychiatry, and certified by the United Council for Neurologic Subspecialties in behavioral neurology and neuropsychiatry.

Charlotte Watts, Ph.D. (Planning Committee Member), is a professor in social and mathematical epidemiology and founding director of the Gender Violence and Health Centre (GVHC) at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM). An internationally renowned expert on Violence Against Women, and on Gender and HIV, she has more than 15 years of experience in HIV and violence research. Originally trained as a mathematician, with further training in epidemiology and public health, Dr. Watts brings a unique, multidisciplinary perspective to the complex challenge of addressing women’s vulnerability to violence and to HIV, with a strong commitment to drawing upon the multidisciplinary expertise of GVHC to conduct rigorous, action-oriented research to inform change. Dr. Watts has held several senior research and advisory positions, including acting as a core research team member for the WHO Multi-Country Study on Women’s Health and Domestic Violence; chair of the Expert Working Group to Assess the Global Burden of Inter-personal Violence; advisor to the UK Prevalence Study of the Mistreatment and Abuse of Older People; and chair of the Public Health Benefits Working Group of the Rockefeller Foundation Microbicide Initiative. She has served on several WHO Expert Consultations on HIV, on violence against women, and on microbicides, and was Track C co-chair of the Microbicides 2006 conference. She regularly gives presentations at national and international meetings, and at LSHTM teaches Ph.D. and M.Sc. students.

Deanna L. Wilkinson, Ph.D., M.A., is currently associate professor in the Department of Human Development and Family Science in the College of Education and Human Ecology at The Ohio State University, where she conducts research and teaches on urban youth violence, community processes, and violence prevention. Her research explores the causes and consequences of adolescent aggression, how it varies across and depends on contexts, and how it might be prevented. Most broadly, her work examines the ways in which community institutions and processes, as well as more microlevel and sometimes ephemeral dynamics, shape violent behavior. Her long-term goal is to clarify how structural, cultural, and situational factors intersect to produce violence and America’s responses to this violence. She is also very interested in translating research for policy and practice so that

Suggested Citation:"Appendix C: Speaker Biographical Sketches." Institute of Medicine and National Research Council. 2013. Contagion of Violence: Workshop Summary. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/13489.
×

knowledge necessary for solving complex problems actually transfers. She is the 2008 recipient of the Society for Research on Adolescence Young Investigator Award. She was honored at the 13th annual Strategies Against Violence Everywhere (SAVE) awards in 2009 with the Les Wright Youth Advocacy Award. In 2010, she received the College of Education and Human Ecology’s Dean’s Distinguished Service Award for her devotion to community service in Columbus. She received the 2010 Fire and Focus Award as well. In 2011, she was honored as “Woman of the Year” by the I’m Every Woman National Expo. Professor Wilkinson earned her Ph.D. from the School of Criminal Justice at Rutgers University, her M.A. in criminal justice from the University of Illinois at Chicago, and her B.A. in sociology from Cornell College in Mt. Vernon, Iowa.

Jamil Zaki, Ph.D., is an assistant professor of psychology at Stanford University. His research focuses on the cognitive and neural bases of social behavior, and in particular on how people understand each other’s emotions (empathic accuracy), why they conform to each other (social influence), and why they choose to help each other (altruism). He received his B.A. in cognitive neuroscience from Boston University, and his Ph.D. in psychology from Columbia University.

Suggested Citation:"Appendix C: Speaker Biographical Sketches." Institute of Medicine and National Research Council. 2013. Contagion of Violence: Workshop Summary. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/13489.
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The past 25 years have seen a major paradigm shift in the field of violence prevention, from the assumption that violence is inevitable to the recognition that violence is preventable. Part of this shift has occurred in thinking about why violence occurs, and where intervention points might lie. In exploring the occurrence of violence, researchers have recognized the tendency for violent acts to cluster, to spread from place to place, and to mutate from one type to another. Furthermore, violent acts are often preceded or followed by other violent acts.

In the field of public health, such a process has also been seen in the infectious disease model, in which an agent or vector initiates a specific biological pathway leading to symptoms of disease and infectivity. The agent transmits from individual to individual, and levels of the disease in the population above the baseline constitute an epidemic. Although violence does not have a readily observable biological agent as an initiator, it can follow similar epidemiological pathways.

On April 30-May 1, 2012, the Institute of Medicine (IOM) Forum on Global Violence Prevention convened a workshop to explore the contagious nature of violence. Part of the Forum's mandate is to engage in multisectoral, multidirectional dialogue that explores crosscutting, evidence-based approaches to violence prevention, and the Forum has convened four workshops to this point exploring various elements of violence prevention. The workshops are designed to examine such approaches from multiple perspectives and at multiple levels of society. In particular, the workshop on the contagion of violence focused on exploring the epidemiology of the contagion, describing possible processes and mechanisms by which violence is transmitted, examining how contextual factors mitigate or exacerbate the issue. Contagion of Violence: Workshop Summary covers the major topics that arose during the 2-day workshop. It is organized by important elements of the infectious disease model so as to present the contagion of violence in a larger context and in a more compelling and comprehensive way.

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