News and Research Reports 2007

News & Research 2007

November 6, 2007
David Hemenway Receives 2007 Excellence in Science Award
David Hemenway, Director of the Harvard Injury Control Research Center and the Harvard Youth Violence Prevention Center, was honored with the Excellence in Science Award from APHA’s Injury Control and Emergency Health Services Section. This award is given in recognition of outstanding dedication and leadership in the science of injury control and emergency health services with contributions and achievements that have significant and long-term impacts on the field. The award was presented in Washington, D.C. in November 2007 as part of the annual meeting of the American Public Health Association.

August 2007
New HICRC Visiting Scientist
Guilherme Borges, Professor at Universidad Autonoma Metropolitana (Mexico) with a joint position at Instituto Nacional de Psiquiatria  Ramon de la Fuente (Mexico) will be a visiting scholar at HICRC from August  2007 – July 2008. Doctor Borges received his Dr.Sc. in Epidemiology in 1996 at the Instituto Nacional de Salud Publica (Mexico), with a doctoral affiliation at Johns Hopkins School of Public Health and postdoctoral affiliation at Harvard Medical School.  He has published over 134 journal articles and chapter books, both in Spanish and English, mainly in the area of substance abuse and psychiatric epidemiology with over 1500 citations. His areas of interest are methodological, psychosocial, and epidemiological issues as they relate to addictions and mental health. A special focus of interest, in which he has been working on in the last few years, is how alcohol and drug consumption is related to several medical and social problems, such as liver cirrhosis, infant health, suicide and accidents.  While at HICRC, Doctor Borges will be involved in projects related to violence among the youth, with special focus on suicide, substance abuse and immigration.

For more information, please click here for PDF.

June 2007
Beth Molnar Received Mentored Research Scientist Development Award
In June 2007, Dr. Beth E. Molnar, core faculty of the center, received a five-year Mentored Research Scientist Development Award (K01) from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD). This funding will enable Dr. Molnar, a social and psychiatric epidemiologist, to become an independent investigator in prevention science and community-based participatory research (CPBR), and to develop community-level preventive interventions to prevent child abuse and neglect. She will be working closely with an experienced group of mentors: Drs. William Beardslee, David Hemenway, and Deborah Prothrow-Stith. Research studies include: (1) Scientific review of community-level child abuse and neglect prevention research and programs; (2) Multi-level study of the determinants of neighborhood-level collective behaviors in Boston; (3) Specification of unique neighborhood-level factors associated with lower rates of child abuse and neglect, and reduction of mental disorders among abused youth; and (4) Development of a conceptual framework for stages of social transformation of communities through CPBR and community-academic partnerships to protect children.

June 2007
Suicide Prevention Training
Four online workshops on suicide prevention are now available at the National Center for Suicide Prevention Training website:

– “The Research Evidence for Suicide as a Preventable Public Health Problem” 
– “Locating, Understanding, and Presenting Youth Suicide Data”
– “Planning and Evaluation for Youth Suicide Prevention”
– “Youth Suicide Prevention: An Introduction to Gatekeeping”

NCSPT is a joint project of Educational Development Center (EDC), HICRC, and the Northeast Injury Prevention Network. Visit ncspt.org for more information and registration.

April 10, 2007
Guns in Homes Strongly Associated with Higher Rates of Suicide
In the first nationally representative study to examine the relationship between survey measures of household firearm ownership and state level rates of suicide in the U.S., researchers at HICRC found that suicide rates among children, women and men of all ages are higher in states where more households have guns. The study appears in the April 2007 issue of the Journal of Trauma.
View HSPH press release
Download state-level information on gun ownership and suicide rates here.

January 11, 2007
States with higher gun ownership rates have higher homicide rates
The latest study from HICRC, published in the February 2007 issue of Social Science and Medicine, is the first nationally representative study to compare state level homicide rates with survey measures of household firearm ownership. View the press release here. View New York Times article here.