Bindi Naik-Mathuria
University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston, TX·Public Health & Epidemiology
Community gun violence, meaning assaults and homicides with firearms, is the leading cause of firearm injury and death among young people in U.S. cities.
- Fields
Public Health & Epidemiology
Medicine & Clinical Research
Social Science
- Topics
gun violence
firearm injury
community violence
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Sep 2028
What they work on
- Develop a youth-informed video series on conflict resolution, avoiding retaliation, and safe social media posting, co-created by youth ambassadors, violence interrupters and content experts in Houston and Memphis, and refined through community feedback.
- Test whether watching the Rise Up video program changes adolescents' attitudes about the consequences of gun carrying and use, using youth cohorts in middle schools and community settings in high-risk neighborhoods.
- Assess secondary effects of the program on gun carrying, fighting, awareness of firearm risks, and connection to supportive adults, using a mixed-methods evaluation that combines quantitative and qualitative data.
More about the research
Programs that stop violence before the first shot is fired are scarce. Mentoring and conflict-resolution programs, including those run by community violence interrupters (trained workers who step into conflicts to prevent shootings), do reduce violence. They are also costly and limited in reach. The question here is whether a cheaper, easy-to-share video program can change how teenagers think and act around guns and fighting.
Why it matters
Gun violence is the leading public health threat to American youth, especially in disadvantaged urban neighborhoods. A low-cost video program designed by youth could let schools and community youth programs offer violence prevention without the heavy staffing that interruption programs need. It may help adolescents in high-risk communities avoid carrying guns, fighting and retaliating.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Alison Miller
University of Michigan, MI·Public Health & Epidemiology
Document how parents of children aged 0–5 understand firearm risk and safe storage and where that diverges from expert recommendations, using focus groups, expert interviews and a national survey.
Nicholas Thomson
Virginia Commonwealth University, VA·Psychology
Test whether Elevate VR, a brief hospital-based virtual reality program teaching de-escalation, emotion regulation and gun safety, reduces firearm violence, re-injury and death in a randomized controlled trial of 360 violently injured youth and their caregivers.
Lauren Magee
Indiana University-Purdue University-Indianapolis, IN·Public Health & Epidemiology
Build trauma networks of everyone present at a shooting (victims and witnesses in police records) plus family members of firearm injury victims identified through Medicaid, using individually linked healthcare and police records from 2016–2022.
The school
University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston: 14 labs on PI Pages, $241M a year on research, 141 research doctorates a year.
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