Faculty and Staff

Daniel Webster, ScD, MPH

Center Director
Professor

Daniel Webster is the inaugural Bloomberg Professor of American Health at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health where he directs the Center for Gun Violence Prevention and Policy and serves as co-lead of the Violence Prevention Workgroup of the Bloomberg American Health Initiative. Webster is one of the nation’s leading experts on the prevention of gun violence and has published over 120 articles in scientific journals on topics including gun policy, violence prevention, youth violence, intimate partner violence, suicide, and substance abuse. He is the lead editor and a contributor to Reducing Gun Violence in America: Informing Policy with Evidence and Analysis (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013). Webster’s research has informed policies to reduce gun violence at the local, state, and federal level. He previously led Baltimore’s Homicide Review Commission and now leads the Johns Hopkins-Baltimore Collaborative for Violence Reduction. His awards include the American Public Health Association’s David Rall Award for science-based advocacy (2015), Baltimore City’s Health Equity Leadership Award (2016), Pioneer Award from the Injury Free Coalition for Kids (2017), and Johns Hopkins University Distinguished Alumni Award (2017).

Cassandra Crifasi, PhD, MPH

Center Deputy Director
Assistant Professor

Cassandra Crifasi is an assistant professor of Health Policy and Management at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Her primary research interests focus broadly on public safety including injury epidemiology and prevention, gun violence prevention and policy, attitudes and behaviors of gun owners, and underground gun markets. Crifasi teaches courses in research and evaluation methods and serves as Deputy Director of the Johns Hopkins-Baltimore Collaborative for Violence Reduction. She earned her PhD in Health Policy and Management from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in 2014 and an MPH in Environmental and Occupational Health from the Dornsife School of Public Health at Drexel University in 2010.

Jon Vernick, JD, MPH

Professor

Jon Vernick is a professor of Health Policy and Management at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Vernick is the primary instructor for courses on issues in Injury and Violence Prevention, and Public Health and the Law. He is also Co-Director of the MPH/JD Program at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Vernick’s research has concentrated on ways in which the law and legal interventions can improve the public's health. He is particularly interested in epidemiological, policy, legal, and ethical issues associated with the prevention of firearm violence and other injuries. His firearm violence prevention work includes evaluations of state gun laws and scholarly analyses of gun policy. He was the primary author of an amicus brief on behalf of public health organizations in District of Columbia v. Heller, which was cited by Justice Breyer. He has published more than 100 scholarly articles and reports on firearms and other public health topics (including motor vehicle safety, tobacco policy, and preparedness). Vernick is committed to translating research findings into policy change, regularly working with legislators, media, courts, and advocates to provide information about effective policies. He earned his BA from Johns Hopkins University, a JD with honors from George Washington University, and an MPH from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

Colleen Barry, PhD, MPP

Chair of the Department of Health Policy and Management
Fred and Julie Soper Professor

Colleen Barry is Chair of the Department of Health Policy and Management and a Fred and Julie Soper Professor with joint appointment in the Department of Mental Health at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Barry's research focuses on how health and social policies can affect a range of outcomes for individuals with substance use disorders and mental illness, including access to medical care and social services, care quality, health care spending, financial protection and mortality. In addition, she conducts empirical research to understand how communication strategies influence public attitudes about addiction, mental illness and violence. A focus of this work is to identify evidence-based approaches to reducing stigma. She has led research studies funded by the NIH and various foundations including the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the Commonwealth Fund and the Arnold Foundation. She has authored over 160 peer-reviewed publications on a range of health policy and public health topics in journals such as the New England Journal of Medicine, Pediatrics, Health Affairs and the American Journal of Public Health. Barry is founding co-director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Mental Health and Addiction Policy Research. She is a core faculty member with the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Policy and Research. She is Principal Investigator of the Johns Hopkins NIMH T32 Mental Health Services and Systems Training Grant. She serves on various national advisory boards on policy related to addiction, mental health and violence. She is currently a member of the National Academy of Medicine Consensus Panel on Medication Treatment for Opioid Use Disorder. Barry is also co-chair of the Forum on Mental Health and Substance Use Disorders of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.

Jacquelyn Campbell, PhD, RN

Professor
Anna D. Wolf Chair

Jacquelyn Campbell, PhD, RN, is Anna D. Wolf Chair and Professor in the Johns Hopkins University School of Nursing. Dr. Campbell has published more than 295 articles, seven books and been Principle Investigator of more than 17 major grants in her decades of advocacy policy work collaborating with domestic violence survivors, advocates, health care professionals and marginalized communities. She is particularly known for her research on domestic violence homicide and the development and validation of the Danger Assessment (DA) that helps IPV survivors more accurately assess their risk of being killed or almost killed by their abusive partner. The research that provided the validation data for the DA was the Risk Factors for Femicide study (with D. Webster) that established abuser gun ownership as one of the strongest risk factors for DV homicide and homicide-suicide of women. This research has provided support for policies to remove guns from known domestic violence offenders about which she has testified and provided evidence in numerous policy formation proceedings including the US Congress. She is an elected member of the National Academy of Medicine, the American Academy of Nursing, is on the Board of Futures Without Violence and was on the boards of four domestic violence shelters. Campbell has consulted for DHHS, CDC, NIH, the Office on Violence Against Women, the Department of Defense and multiple advocacy organizations.

Mark Dredze, PhD, MS

Associate Professor

Mark Dredze is the John C. Malone Associate Professor in Computer Science at the Johns Hopkins University, with affiliations in the Malone Center for Engineering in Healthcare, the Applied Physics Lab, the Human Language Technology Center of Excellence, the Center for Language and Speech Processing and the Center for Population Health Information Technology. He holds an appointment in Health Sciences Informatics in the School of Medicine. Dredze’s work explores new machine learning technologies for modeling language data. His work focuses on public health applications of these methods, such as discovering reasons for vaccine refusal, tracking developments in the tobacco control landscape, and measuring reactions to gun violence events. He earned his BS from Northwestern University, his MS from Yeshiva University, and his PhD from the University of Pennsylvania.

Mitch Doucette, PhD, MS

Assistant Scientist 

Mitch Doucette is an assistant scientist in the Department of Health Policy and Management at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. He is affiliated with the Center for Gun Violence Prevention and Policy and the Center for Injury Research and Policy. He uses quantitative and qualitative methodologies to examine the impact of public policy on injury and violence outcomes, including firearm violence and motor vehicle crashes. Much of his work has focused on workplace homicides and injuries. He received his PhD from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and his MS from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. 

Shannon Frattaroli, PhD, MPH

Associate Professor

Shannon Frattaroli is an associate professor of Health Policy and Management at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health where she serves as core faculty with the Center for Gun Policy and Research. Frattaroli teaches courses in Public Health Policy Formulation, Implementation Research and Practice, and Qualitative Research Methods. Her research focuses on policy and advocacy strategies designed to prevent injury and violence – particularly firearm-related domestic violence, with particular attention to how interventions are implemented once in place. Frattaroli is committed to efforts that advance the translation of research findings into policy and practice. Toward that end, she is involved in the educational efforts and scholarship about Gun Violence Restraining Order laws that provide a process for temporarily dispossessing people of their firearms when they are exhibiting dangerous behaviors.

Katherine Hoops, MD, MPH

Assistant Professor

Katherine Hoops is an assistant professor of Pediatric Critical Care Medicine at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. Her areas of clinical expertise are in pediatric sepsis and pediatric trauma. Dr. Hoops completed her residency training in pediatrics at the University of Alabama Birmingham before coming to the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine to complete her fellowship in pediatric critical care medicine. Her research is focused on the prevention of pediatric gun injury. She conducts research on understanding messaging to patients and families on guns and improving physicians’ counseling on firearm safety. She is also involved in innovative quality improvement initiatives studying the use technology to improve care of critically ill patients and has been named as a Hexcite Fellow with the Johns Hopkins Technology Innovation Center. Hoops received her undergraduate degree from Florida State University, her medical degree at the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine in Miami, and her Master of Public Health in Health Policy and Management at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

Dylan Jackson, PhD 

Assistant Professor

Dylan B. Jackson is an assistant professor in the Department of Population, Family, and Reproductive Health in the Bloomberg School of Public Health at Johns Hopkins University. He is a developmental and health criminologist who researches child and adolescent health in the context of violence, crime, and the criminal justice system. He currently serves as the Co-Director of the Health Criminology Research Consortium – an interdisciplinary collaboration of researchers investigating the nexus of health, crime, and the criminal justice system, and how to improve effectiveness in the areas of prevention, clinical intervention, and policy.

Odis Johnson Jr., PhD 

Bloomberg Distinguished Professor of Social Policy and STEM Equity

Odis Johnson Jr., PhD, is the Bloomberg Distinguished Professor of Social Policy and STEM Equity at Johns Hopkins University, with faculty appointments in the Department of Health Policy and Management at the Bloomberg School of Public Health, the School of Education as Executive Director of the Hopkins Center for Safe and Healthy Schools, and in the Department of Sociology. He also directs the Institute in Critical Quantitative, Computational, and Mixed Methodologies (ICQCM) and serves as editor of the American Sociological Association journal, Sociology of Education. Johnson was previously a faculty member at Washington University in St. Louis, and chaired the African American Studies Department at the University of Maryland. His work on the interrelated topics of neighborhoods, social policy, and race have been funded by the Ford Foundation Fellows Program of the National Academies, National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health, William T. Grant Foundation, and the Spencer Foundation. He currently is the principal investigator of the Fatal Interactions with Police Study (FIPS) which has generated a national data file of police homicides, and three NSF-funded studies that examine how strategies to maintain law and order in neighborhoods and schools impact the representation of race-gender groups in the School-to-Prison and STEM pipelines. In 2021, he joined the standing expert advisory panels of the Educational Testing Service (ETS), the U.S. Dept. of Housing and Urban Development HCV Mobility Demonstration, the U.S. Dept. of Education NCES High School and Beyond: 2022 Technical Review Panel, and provided expert testimony to the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine about the future of methods and measurement. 

Vanya Jones

Assistant Professor

Vanya Jones is an associate professor in the Department of Health, Behavior, and Society at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Her work is focused on research and practice to reduce injuries by applying social and behavioral science theories and research methods to create, implement, and evaluate behavior change programs. Her program of research and practice activities address both unintentional and intentional injuries among vulnerable populations of children, adolescents, and older adults. She has specific expertise in older driver research, youth development and violence prevention, child injury prevention, and community-engaged research.

Alex McCourt, JD, PhD, MPH

Director of Legal Research

Alex McCourt is an assistant scientist of Health Policy and Management at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. He is affiliated with the Center for Gun Violence Prevention and Policy and the Center for Law and the Public’s Health. Trained as a public health lawyer, he combines legal research with empirical methods to study instances in which law plays a role in shaping the public’s health. Much of his work has focused on firearm policy and violence, including homicide, suicide, and intimate partner violence. He received his PhD from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and his JD/MPH from the University of Arizona.

Beth McGinty, PhD, MS

Associate Professor

Beth McGinty is an associate professor in the Departments of Health Policy and Management and Mental Health at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. In addition to being a core member of the Center for Gun Violence Prevention and Policy, she serves as a co-deputy director of the Center for Mental Health and Addiction Policy Research. Her research focuses on issues at the intersection of mental illness, substance use, and gun violence, including firearm suicide. At the Center for Gun Policy and Research, McGinty uses public opinion surveys and message framing experiments to assess public support for gun violence prevention policies. McGinty has conducted multiple analyses of news media coverage of gun violence and mental illness, as well as national public opinion surveys to assess Americans’ views about firearm policy and practices. She received her PhD in Health Policy and Management in 2013 from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health where she was a Sommer Scholar and received an MS in Health and Behavior Studies from Columbia University in 2006.

Paul S. Nestadt, MD

Assistant Professor

Paul Nestadt is an assistant professor jointly appointed in the Department of Psychiatry at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and the Department of Mental Health at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. He completed medical school at New York Medical College, psychiatric residency at the Johns Hopkins Hospital, and a postdoctoral fellowship in the Psychiatric Epidemiology Training Program at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Nestadt’s research interests include the epidemiology of suicide and the role of firearm access in predicting death. His suicide research also includes opioid-related suicidality and the limitations of clinical screening for dangerousness. Nestadt serves as the supervising psychiatrist for the Johns Hopkins Anxiety Disorders Clinic and as attending psychiatrist in the Motivated Behaviors Unit.

Elizabeth A. Stuart, PhD

Associate Dean for Education
Professor

Elizabeth A. Stuart is Professor in the Department of Mental Health at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, with joint appointments in the Department of Biostatistics and the Department of Health Policy and Management, and Associate Dean for Education at JHSPH. She received her PhD in statistics in 2004 from Harvard University and worked at Mathematica Policy Research from 2004 to 2006.  Stuart has extensive experience in methods for estimating causal effects and dealing with the complications of missing data in experimental and non-experimental studies, particularly as applied to mental health, public policy, and education. She has published influential papers on propensity score methods and generalizing treatment effect estimate to target populations and taught courses and short courses on causal inference and propensity scores to a wide range of audiences.  Her primary areas of application include mental health, substance use, and policy evaluation, including co-directing the JHSPH Center for Mental Health and Addiction Policy Research. She frequently serves as a statistical consultant for evaluations of policies and programs across a range of applied areas, including gun violence prevention, education, and opioids. Stuart is a Fellow of the American Statistical Association and has been recognized with the mid-career award from the Health Policy Statistics Section of the American Statistical Association, the Gertrude Cox Award for applied statistics, and the Myrto Lefkopoulou award from the Harvard University Department of Biostatistics.

Rebecca G. Williams, MSPH

Director of Academic Innovation and Outreach

Rebecca G. Williams first began working with the Center for Gun Violence Prevention and Policy in 2017 as a Graduate Research Assistant. In 2018, Rebecca began working full-time with the Center as a Research Data Analyst then the Center’s Research Program Manager and was promoted to Research Associate in 2020. At the Center, Rebecca is most intimately involved with projects related to community-oriented policing, proactive gun law enforcement, and the development of educational opportunities and programs on gun violence prevention research and policy. Rebecca has a strong background in community-based participatory research through which she has worked alongside communities of color as well as with children and families with special health care needs to create systemic change for equitable health outcomes. Her research interests include correctional health care reform, nature-based violence interventions, interactive pedagogical models to advance gun violence prevention advocacy, and how counterproductive gender norms influence male development. Rebecca earned her BS in Health and Wellness Promotion and BA in Interdisciplinary Studies summa cum laude from the University of North Carolina at Asheville in 2014 and her MSPH in Health Policy and Management from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in 2019.  

Marisa Doll Booty, MHS

Research Data Analyst

Marisa Doll Booty earned her MHS in Mental Health from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. While working for her MHS, Marisa completed a thesis with the Moore Center for the Prevention of Child Sexual Abuse on recidivism outcomes for juveniles who have sexually offended. She began working with the Center for Gun Violence Prevention and Policy as a student and transitioned to full-time staff upon graduation. Marisa is interested in criminology, specifically penology, and how juveniles and other vulnerable populations interact with components of the criminal justice system.

Shani Buggs, PhD, MPH

Affiliated Research Analyst

Shani Buggs is a Postdoctoral Fellow with the Violence Prevention Research Program at the University of California Davis. Her primary areas of research include community-level gun violence prevention programs and policies, comprehensive approaches to reducing violence through policies and programs at the local, state, and federal levels, and intersections between drugs, drug law enforcement, and gun violence. Buggs has worked for years with Baltimore Mayor’s Office, Police Department, and other city agencies and leaders to help coordinate efforts and provide technical assistance to enhance Baltimore’s violence reduction and prevention strategies. She completed her graduate degree in Public Health and her doctorate in Health and Public Policy at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

Caitlin Hoffman, MPH 

Director of Communications  

Caitlin Hoffman is a public health communications professional with over a decade of experience in program development, evaluation and communicating public health information to government officials, community stakeholders, healthcare professionals and the public. She leads the strategic communication program for the Department of Health Policy and Management, including the Center for Gun Violence Prevention and Policy. She has conducted original research on health communication strategies and presented work at national conferences including the National Conference on Health Communication. Caitlin is passionate about translating evidence-based research into practice, using data to drive policy change, and emphasizing the importance of effective communication strategies. She comes to Hopkins after working for the Philadelphia Department of Public Health. Caitlin earned her BA from Pennsylvania State University and an MPH from Emory University. 

Chelsea Montero 

Senior Administrative Coordinator 

Chelsea Montero has more than 20 years of senior-level executive management support experience. Her philosophy centers on what role she can play in helping others. With an educational background in art and a creative design enthusiast, Chelsea incorporates this into her take on presentation, problem-solving, and overall function in the office. She practices a streamlined and intuitive approach to assistance. It rests on empathy, efficiency, astute problem solving, and a sense of humor.