The College of Social Work is proud to be home to distinguished faculty conducting noteworthy, groundbreaking research. CSW faculty scholarship addresses Grand Challenges for Social Work, tackling the nation’s toughest social problems. The Grand Challenges initiative for social work is led by the American Academy of Social Work and Social Welfare to champion social progress powered by science.
In a policy brief and on its website, the initiative identified key suggestions for addressing 14 Grand Challenges, with Preventing Gun Violence identified as a primary target area. According to a concept paper, the United States currently leads the world with the highest rate of gun violence. With guns widely available and accessible, they present a lethal risk that constitutes a unique grand challenge, and one that places social workers in special positions to address this dangerous national problem. The next 10 years will involve researchers, practitioners, policymakers and other stakeholders engaging in directed activities that will move the Grand Challenges forward and result in social work accomplishments.
Dr. Gia Barboza-Salerno’s research is deeply committed to the Grand Challenge to Prevent Firearm Violence, encompassing both interpersonal firearm injury and firearm suicide. Their scholarship adopts a public health framework that documents and challenges the systemic inequities shaping exposure to violence across the lifespan. This work is grounded in Barboza-Salerno’s lived experience as a Cape Verdean, female-presenting scholar and attorney, as well as their professional background advocating for survivors of domestic violence within legal and criminal justice systems. This perspective ensures an explicit social justice lens, translating complex quantitative evidence into legal and policy interventions aimed at systemic accountability.
Barboza-Salerno’s research has been supported by the National Science Foundation, State Street and the United Way, and is informed by sustained community engagement. This includes advising the Ohio Public Defender’s Office on the use of structural and spatial data in death penalty mitigation to contextualize clients raised in violence-prone environments. Their prior role as director of Research at the Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative in Boston focused on spatial inequality and public health in Roxbury and Dorchester, experiences that directly inform their current focus on how resource deprivation shapes firearm-related violence and suicide risk.
A central contribution of Barboza-Salerno’s work is empirically linking historical structural discrimination to contemporary firearm risk. This research reframes firearm-related homicide and suicide as outcomes of organized abandonment and structural racism rather than individual pathology or social disorganization. For example, a study of firearm homicide risk in Chicago used Bayesian spatial models to integrate historical Home Owners’ Loan Corporation redlining data with contemporary Home Mortgage Disclosure Act lending records, classifying neighborhoods into distinct disinvestment and reinvestment trajectories. Neighborhoods that were historically redlined and continue to experience lending discrimination exhibited significantly higher firearm homicide risk, an association partially explained by contemporary deprivation and racial segregation. These findings position firearm violence as both a public health emergency and a civil rights issue that require structural policy solutions.
Barboza-Salerno extends this prevention agenda by documenting the chronic and cumulative impacts of firearm violence exposure on children and youth, particularly through daily routines. Their work consistently demonstrates that firearm incidents cluster near schools using advanced spatial methods, including bivariate cross-K functions, network-constrained analysis and spatial computational modeling. In Boston, the median distance from a school to the nearest shooting was 0.33 kilometers, with more than half of the schools experiencing at least one shooting within 400 meters. In Compton, California, nearly all K–12 schools had at least one shooting within a five-minute walk. In Englewood, Chicago, Barboza-Salerno’s innovative use of acoustic sensor data, often criticized as biased due to placement in high-violence areas, revealed widespread indirect exposure through audible gunfire along walkable routes, with exposure peaking during the afternoon commute. Together, these studies document the routine, place-based trauma experienced by students traveling to and from school.
Their work further demonstrates that structural boundaries matter. In Cook County, spatial boundary analyses showed that “social frontiers,” defined as sharp economic disparities between adjacent neighborhoods, were associated with a 22 percent increase in child mortality risk independent of overall disadvantage. In Los Angeles, analysis of child homicide locations using inhomogeneous K-functions found little evidence of contagion, indicating that clustering of child victimization is driven primarily by structural vulnerability rather than behavioral spread. These findings reinforce the need for structural interventions rather than individual-level responses.
Beyond interpersonal firearm violence, Barboza-Salerno situates firearm injury and death within a broader continuum of violence-related harm that includes firearm suicide, child fatalities and long-term impacts on intimate partners. Using Structured Topic Modeling of child fatality narratives across Pennsylvania, their work identified firearm-related injury as a distinct and recurring theme, often involving unsecured firearms and concentrated in counties with higher poverty and larger non-White populations. These findings underscore the intersection of socioeconomic inequality, accidental firearm deaths and suicide risk as a structural prevention issue.
Parallel suicide research demonstrates the central role of firearms in lethality. In Santa Clara County, California, self-inflicted firearm injuries accounted for 28 percent of suicide deaths and were significantly more common among males across all racial and ethnic groups. In Cook County, Illinois, the proportion of suicide deaths involving firearms increased from 38 percent in 2023 to 44 percent in 2024, further emphasizing firearm access as a critical prevention target.
Barboza-Salerno’s research on intimate partner violence documents the persistence of emotional and physical symptoms following injury, particularly among survivors experiencing loss of consciousness as a proxy for probable traumatic brain injury. Survivors with serious injuries had significantly higher odds of symptoms lasting a month or longer, with the greatest risk among females, Native American or Alaska Native survivors and Asian or Pacific Islander survivors. Among injured female survivors who lost consciousness, more than ninety percent were predicted to experience persistent symptoms, highlighting the need for survivor-centered and trauma-informed legal and medical responses.
A unifying objective of Barboza-Salerno’s scholarship is to generate legal and policy implications that move firearm violence and firearm suicide prevention beyond punitive criminal justice approaches toward public health and structural equity frameworks. Their work supports formally redefining school firearm violence to include exposure within 400 meters of school boundaries, recognizing that witnessing or hearing gunfire constitutes chronic trauma with educational and mental health consequences. This exclusion disproportionately harms students in communities of color and perpetuates racial disparities in education. Barboza-Salerno further argues that chronic exposure to firearm violence constitutes a trauma-related disability under Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act and the Americans with Disabilities Act, creating a legal duty for schools to provide accommodations and trauma-focused supports, as recognized in Peter P. v. Compton Unified School District.
Their research also calls for structural accountability and long-term reinvestment strategies that directly address the historical and contemporary systems producing firearm violence and suicide risk. By linking redlining and discriminatory lending to present-day firearm harm, this work argues for the use of public funds to redesign urban spaces to promote healing and post-traumatic growth. This reframing challenges the unequal allocation of resources following firearm-related tragedies, contrasting extensive government investment in predominantly White communities affected by mass shootings with the lack of comparable support in communities like Compton, despite sustained exposure to violence.
Finally, Barboza-Salerno’s findings support specific firearm safety and survivor-centered policy reforms. Evidence from child fatality narratives involving unsecured firearms reinforces the need for mandatory safe-storage laws to prevent both unintentional deaths and suicide. Their intimate partner violence research calls for shame-informed legal and medical practices, including routine screening for traumatic brain injury, judicial training to recognize trauma responses, and courtroom procedures that reduce institutional betrayal and secondary harm.
Taken together, Barboza-Salerno’s scholarship advances the Grand Challenge to Prevent Firearm Violence by revealing the socio-spatial architecture of firearm-related harm, documenting cumulative trauma across the life course, and providing a rigorous empirical foundation for structural, legal and policy reforms that address firearm violence and suicide as public health and civil rights crises rooted in systemic inequality.
