WALS NIH Director's Lecture: Reducing Firearm Violence: A Public Health Approach

David Hemenway, Ph.D., Professor of Health Policy, is Director of the Harvard Injury Control Research Center. He formerly spent a week each year at the University of Vermont as a James Marsh Visiting Professor-at-Large. The lecture will describe the enormity of the US gun violence problem and the public health approach for reducing that problem. It will illustrate the public health approach, including emphasizing the importance of data and research, with examples of ways to reduce suicide and unintentional firearm deaths. Dr. Hemenway teaches classes on injury and on economics. At HSPH he has won ten teaching awards as well as the inaugural community engagement award. Dr. Hemenway has written widely on injury prevention, including articles on firearms, violence, suicide, child abuse, motor vehicle crashes, fires, falls and fractures. He headed the pilot for the National Violent Death Reporting System, which provides detailed and comparable information on suicide and homicide. In 2012 he was recognized by the Centers for Disease Control& Prevention as one of the “ twenty most influential injury and violence professionals over the past twenty years. ” In articles on insurance, Dr. Hemenway described a general reason why low-risk individuals often buy insurance, and coined the term “ propitious selection. ” Recent economic studies have focused on empirically determining which goods are more and less positional (e.g., bought largely to “ keep up with the Joneses ”...
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