Lauren Magee
Indiana University-Purdue University-Indianapolis, IN·Public Health & Epidemiology
When someone is shot, the harm does not stop with that person. Witnesses, family members and people sharing a home may also face higher risks of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), anxiety, depression, further injury and death.
- Fields
Public Health & Epidemiology
Social Science
Medicine & Clinical Research
- Topics
firearm injury
gun violence
trauma networks
- Grants
- 2 known grants, through Aug 2027
What they work on
- 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.
- Estimate how often children, adolescents and young adults in firearm trauma networks have mental health problems, clinical care visits, firearm injuries and deaths during the five years after a shooting.
- Develop methods to identify and link family and household members of firearm injury survivors using residential addresses and linked clinical, public health, Medicaid and police records from Indianapolis, 2000–2022.
- Compare changes in clinical care use, mental health, chronic conditions and firearm injury after a nonfatal shooting among household family, non-household family and non-family household members of survivors.
More about the research
Yet these exposed but uninjured people are hard to find in existing data, so interventions largely miss them. This research treats firearm injury as a public health epidemic that spreads through communities and social networks much like an infectious disease. It builds methods to trace this 'ripple effect' by linking individual records from healthcare, Medicaid, public health and police sources.
Why it matters
Few interventions exist for the relatives, household members and witnesses of firearm injury survivors, even though they may face lasting mental and physical health effects. Showing that these people can be identified in routine health and police records, and measuring their outcomes, could help clinics and community programs reach exposed children, adolescents, young adults and families sooner. The aim is to prevent future illness and death.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Bindi Naik-Mathuria
University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston, TX·Public Health & Epidemiology
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.
Douglas F Zatzick
University of Washington, WA·Medicine & Clinical Research
Test whether a brief stepped care intervention, combining care management, medication and psychotherapy, reduces PTSD symptoms over 12 months compared with required screening and referral, in a randomized trial of 424 hospitalized injury survivors.
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.
The school
Indiana University-Purdue University-Indianapolis: 25 labs on PI Pages, $89M a year on research, 120 research doctorates a year.
More about Indiana University-Purdue University-Indianapolis
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