Affiliated Faculty

Dr. Carter is a Professor of Emergency Medicine (School of Medicine) and Health Behavior & Health Education (School of Public Health) at the University of Michigan. He is the Co-Director of the UM Institute for Firearm Injury Prevention, the Director of the CDC-funded University of Michigan Injury Prevention Center, and part of the leadership team for the NICHD-funded Firearm Safety among Children and Teens (FACTS) Consortium. Dr. Carter’s research is within the field of firearm injury prevention, specifically the development, testing, and implementation of emergency department (ED)‐based interventions to decrease firearm violence, youth violence, and associated risk behaviors such as substance use among high‐risk urban youth populations. He also has a line of research focused on using intensive longitudinal data, collected via innovative m-health applications, to characterize epidemiological and contextual factors underlying adolescent risky firearm behaviors. He is the past Chair of the ACEP Trauma and Injury Prevention Section, serves as an Assistant Editor for the Annals of Emergency Medicine, and has served as a member of the Technical Advisory Group focused on developing a firearm research agenda for the American College of Emergency Physicians. Dr. Carter has research funding as a PI or Co-I on grants from NIDA, NIAAA, CDCP, and NICHD, all focused within the field of violence and injury prevention.

Dr. Goldstick is the co-director of the Data & Methods Core at the Institute for Firearm Injury Prevention, and a Research Associate Professor of Emergency Medicine at the University of Michigan. Dr. Goldstick is a statistician by training and his past research spans several areas of social epidemiology including infectious disease, childhood problem behaviors, substance use, and violence. He has extensive expertise in statistical analyses, including predictive modeling and the analysis of longitudinal and spatially dependent data, especially as it applies to substance use, injury/violence data, and public health research. He has been the PI of a NIDA grant to study age-dependence in the predictors of substance use and its comorbidities, and an NIAAA grant-funded to study predictors of alcohol use transitions and how those transitions coalesce with transitions in other health behaviors. His current and ongoing work focuses on violence and substance use epidemiology, firearm surveillance, and estimating behavioral intervention treatment effects. Specifically, Dr. Goldstick is currently PI of an R01 funded to use machine learning methods to optimally predict future violence involvement, and directs a statewide near real-time surveillance system for firearm incidents in Michigan, and is the lead statistician on over a half dozen current federally funded studies.

Dr. Hsieh is a Research Assistant Professor at the Institute for Firearm Injury Prevention at the University of Michigan. She is also the Project Director for the Flint Adolescent Study. Dr. Hsieh’s primary research interests include adolescent resiliency and health disparity, focusing on substance use and other health behaviors related to cancer or cancer prevention. She is also interested in the longitudinal and cross-domain relations among individual and social-ecological factors of risk behaviors in adolescence to adulthood.

Dr. Daniel Lee is a Research Assistant Professor at the University of Michigan’s Institute for Firearm Injury Prevention and School of Social Work. Dr. Lee’s research focuses on socioecological factors that contribute to youth firearm violence, with particular attention to those living in communities facing concentrated disadvantage. Trained in clinical and quantitative psychology, as well as public health, he investigates how socioecological contexts influence psychological responses—such as retaliatory attitudes and hopelessness—that increase the risk of firearm carriage and aggression. His work also examines how the context and conditions in which youth reside contribute to downstream risk factors for violence. In parallel, he highlights protective factors, including organized activity participation, that buffer against these risks. Dr. Lee has evaluated violence prevention strategies such as Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design, the Say Something Anonymous Reporting System, Youth Empowerment Solutions, and public art installations.

Dr. Miller is a developmental psychologist who studies risk and resilience in children and families. Dr. Miller is an Associate Professor in the Department of Health Behavior and Health Education (HBHE) at the UM School of Public Health. She was previously in the Department of Psychiatry (Division of Child and Family Psychiatry) at Brown Medical School. She is affiliated with Michigan’s Center for Human Growth and Development, where she directs the Clinical-Community Interventions Group and is a member of the Obesity Research Group.

Rebeccah Sokol, PhD, is a behavioral scientist who studies youth trauma exposure. Her overarching research agenda seeks to ease the burden of adversity experienced in childhood and adolescence, with a central focus on reducing youth violence exposure and involvement. Sokol uses a developmental lens, public health framework, quasi-experimental methods and data science techniques to inform strategies that prevent youth trauma. A common thread of Sokol’s research involves describing risk and identifying etiological factors for youth firearm violence exposure in different populations, with the ultimate goal of improving firearm injury and violence prevention interventions and policies.

Sarah Stilwell is a Research Investigator at the Institute for Firearm Injury Prevention. Her research focuses on comprehensive school safety, evaluation work, implementation efficacy, youth violence prevention, and positive youth development. She has experience in community-based research, program management/implementation, and mixed-methods data collection and analysis. As a former elementary educator, she brings a unique perspective that aims to bridge both research and practice. Sarah earned her Ph.D. in Education and Psychology from the University of Michigan.

Dr. Stoddard is an Assistant Professor in the School of Nursing with a joint appointment in the Department of Health Behavior and Health Education in the School of Public Health. Her research interests include understanding the interaction between individual factors and social and environmental factors (e.g., neighborhood characteristics), and how together they shape the psychosocial development and health trajectories of at-risk urban youth. In 2013, she was awarded an Early Career Development Award (K01) from the National Institute on Drug Abuse to study the role of neighborhood characteristics on the co-occurrence of alcohol and drug use and violence among youth. In addition, she studies the application of behavioral and ecological approaches to preventing risk behaviors in youth.

Elyse Thulin is a Research Assistant Professor with the U-M Institute for Firearm Injury Prevention. She uses a mix of traditional and computational methods to understand complex violence and substance use problems, including but not limited to cyber dating violence, the use of anonymous report systems in schools, and interactions in online substance use recovery forms.