Chapin Hall to house center aimed at tackling youth violence

Chapin Hall at the University of Chicago will be the home of the Chicago Center for Youth Violence Prevention, one of four recently named National Academic Centers of Excellence funded by a $1.3 million grant from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Led by Chapin Hall Research Fellow Deborah Gorman-Smith, the CCYVP will build on earlier funding to develop an integrated set of activities aimed at reducing youth violence within targeted Chicago communities, and using the knowledge gained in this process to inform violence-prevention efforts more broadly. These National Academic Centers of Excellence are intended to "build the scientific infrastructure necessary to support development and widespread application of effective youth violence interventions, promote interdisciplinary research strategies to address the problem of youth violence, foster collaboration between academic researchers and communities, and empower communities to address the problem of youth violence," according to the CDC. CCYVP brings together a multidisciplinary team of researchers with broad expertise and deep experience from within Chapin Hall, across the University of Chicago and at the University of Illinois at Chicago to focus on the challenge of reducing violent behavior in Chicago's inner city. The Chapin Hall team includes Gorman-Smith, principal investigator and CCYVP director, along with Chapin Hall Senior Researcher Michael Schoeny. They have collaborated for more than 20 years with Co-Investigator David Henry, University of Illinois at Chicago School of Public Health, and the Chicago Project on Violence Prevention.