A nonlinear path into research, rejection, and finding a purpose
Gun violence research has grown dramatically over the past decade, but the field is still small relative to the scale of the problem. Across the country, more students and early-career scholars are expressing interest in studying violence prevention, public health, and the social conditions that shape community safety. I’m often asked how someone actually ends up doing this work. The honest answer is that there isn’t a single path. Mine certainly wasn’t straightforward.
I spend a lot of time writing about research and very little time writing about myself. I’m a pretty normal dude (I think??) who loves his family, his pugs, horror movies, and early 2000’s punk and emo music. I also happen to be a gun violence researcher and professor who really loves his job.
Over the past few years, I’ve had the honor of working with the New Jersey Gun Violence Research Center, helping mentor people who are just starting out in their careers. Working with graduate students and postdoctoral fellows is one of the most gratifying parts of my job, hands down. I’ve received feedback that sharing my own research trajectory—from a very confused undergraduate student who just wanted to play in rock bands to tenured professor—has been helpful to others considering a career in research and academia.
So this blog post is a little different from my typical writing. Instead of focusing on findings or data, I want to talk about the path that brought me here and how I became a gun violence researcher. If you’re reading this and still figuring things out, I hope it shows that you don’t always need a perfectly mapped plan to end up somewhere meaningful.
Stumbling into Sociology
When I was an undergraduate at Marist College, I was a double major in Spanish and communications. It seemed like a good idea at the time. I loved the challenge of learning a new language and was told that a communications degree would give me plenty of job prospects after graduation. So I did both and figured I’d sort out how they fit together eventually.
In my junior year, I took a research methods course with a professor who showed me that research could be creative, intellectually stimulating, and even liberating. You get to just…ask whatever questions you want? And then design a way to figure out the answer? “Great!” I told myself. “I make up stuff all the time.” I started to wonder how I might do more research, maybe even as a career.
At the same time, I was taking advertising and communications classes. One of my professors pulled me aside and gently pointed out that I wasn’t really engaging with the material. Instead, I was constantly criticizing it and questioning the role of advertising in society. Maybe advertising wasn’t for me? Given my very insightful undergraduate commentary about advertising melting all of our brains, she recommended a book called The McDonaldization of Society by George Ritzer. That book was my first real exposure to sociology.
It’s a little embarrassing now, but soon after reading Ritzer, I literally bought a book called Sociology for Dummies, which explained what sociology actually is, its major thinkers (Marx, Weber, Durkheim), and how it applies to the real world without using a bunch of fancy academic jargon. I loved it. I was ready to abandon my already confusing career plan of creating advertisements in a language I couldn’t speak very well and instead become a sociologist. There was just one problem: my college didn’t offer a sociology major. In fact, it didn’t offer any sociology courses at all.
The early college years, when my main career plan involved rock ’n’ roll, not gun violence research.
Rejection, Rejection, Rejection
I started doing what any confused undergraduate does when they discover a new interest: I began pestering my professors with questions. Eventually someone explained that if I wanted to become a professor myself, I would first need something called a PhD. I didn’t know anyone with a PhD except my professors, but I figured I’d apply and see what happened.
I applied to several PhD programs during my senior year. None of them accepted me. I did, however, receive an offer to do a Master’s degree in sociology at the New School for Social Research in New York City. Conveniently, many of my friends were moving to the city around that time and I had just started a new band. So I accepted the offer, moved into a sketchy loft in Brooklyn, and began my formal sociological education. It was on.
The next year I applied to PhD programs again. And again, I didn’t get into any of them. So I spent another year studying sociological theory and qualitative methods while working full time in a software sales job (I was terrible!) and playing gigs at night. I decided I would apply one last time the following year. If everyone said no again, maybe I simply wasn’t cut out to be a sociologist after all. As luck would have it, two programs finally said yes. One of them, Emory University, was a perfect fit. At the time, I was still pretty involved in music and planned to study how musicians create and sustain careers over time. (If you can’t do it, you might as well study it, right?) I had my PhD acceptance and I had my research plan. All I had to do was wait for the semester to begin.
How Sandy Hook Changed Everything
I’m from a small town in Connecticut and around the time I was accepted into graduate school, a disturbed 20-year-old named Adam Lanza killed his mother and then drove to Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, where he murdered 26 people. Most of those killed were children between six and seven years old. Newtown sits right next to my hometown of Monroe, and I watched the Sandy Hook massacre devastate a community I loved in real time. I was only an onlooker and my story is far from unique, but Sandy Hook changed me.
When it came time to move to Atlanta for graduate school the following year, I couldn’t shake the image of snow falling on the rows of stuffed animals and candles left at the memorial outside the school. I felt paralyzed. When I arrived for my first semester, I already knew that studying music wasn’t going to happen. Instead, I started taking criminology courses on violence and the criminal justice system, hoping they might help me understand how something like Sandy Hook could happen. I didn’t find the answers I was looking for. But those classes did help clarify something important: I wanted to do research that could help prevent violence like this from happening again.
Eventually I approached my advisor and asked if I could switch my focus from sociology of music to criminology. That meant working with Dr. Bob Agnew, one of the leading criminologists in the field who just so happened to be at Emory. Everyone agreed as long as I could still finish the PhD on time. So I got to work.
Learning How Research Actually Works
Over the next four years, I took criminology and public health courses and learned how to conduct research in collaborative settings. I joined a research center led by a wonderful mentor, Dr. Kathryn Yount, and worked with an awesome group of scholars studying the mental health impacts of intimate partner violence among women in low- and middle-income countries.
Working on those projects taught me that good research is rarely a solo endeavor. Collaboration pushed me out of my comfort zone, exposed me to new methods and ideas, and helped me grow as a researcher much faster than I would have on my own.
At the same time, I still wanted to study gun violence. But funding for that work was extremely limited at the time, and some mentors advised me to avoid the topic because it was politically contentious. So I wrote my dissertation on bullying and violence among adolescents, both online and offline. But I always knew I wanted to return to gun violence research eventually.
Building a Community of Collaborators
After a somewhat chaotic academic job search, I found myself moving with my wife and two pugs to New Jersey to join Rutgers University–Camden as a brand new assistant professor. Like most new faculty members, I had a lot to learn. So I started doing something that turned out to be incredibly helpful: I began cold-emailing researchers whose work I admired. My emails were simple. I would introduce myself, say that I thought their work was awesome, and ask if they might want to collaborate on something. To my surprise, people were incredibly generous with their time. In hindsight, this was one of the most important decisions I made early in my career.
Through those collaborations, I built a network of colleagues studying violence, health, and criminal justice from many different disciplinary perspectives. I learned how to write better papers, design stronger studies, and apply for research funding. There was still a lot of rejection but hey, I was used to it from applying to grad school and playing gigs in smoky bars for two people at a time. I began to take it all less personally and learn from my mistakes. Around that same time, funding for gun violence research slowly began to re-emerge, making it more feasible to pursue the kinds of practical, policy-oriented questions that had drawn me to the topic in the first place.
Along the way, I realized that research only matters if people can understand it. So I began making an effort to communicate my work beyond academic journals by speaking with journalists, writing for public audiences, and trying to explain complicated research in plain language. Eventually, Mike Anestis, the Executive Director at the New Jersey Gun Violence Research Center, noticed that work and invited me to join the center. The rest, as they say, is history.
What Matters Most Along the Way
Over the past several years, I’ve tried to work with as many people as possible. Each collaboration exposes me to new ways of thinking about violence, health, and making the world a safer and more just place. I’m proud of the research we’ve produced, but I’m even more proud of the relationships I’ve built with students, collaborators, and mentors along the way.
Getting tenure felt good, of course, but it didn’t really change how I approach the work. I still try to collaborate widely, communicate research clearly, and contribute to the broader field however I can, including through organizations like the Research Society for the Prevention of Firearm-Related Harms.
Throughout all of this, I’ve tried to maintain balance. I work intentionally during the week and I also spend as much time as possible with my family and friends. I still play music, though mostly now for my son and my pugs. That balance has helped me keep perspective during a time when violence prevention research and public health infrastructure are facing significant political and institutional challenges.
The family together. The two best boys, Goji and Jordy.
Final Thoughts
If you’ve made it this far, you’ve probably noticed that my career path wasn’t linear. In fact, most academic careers aren’t. Many people assume researchers always knew exactly what they wanted to do, but in reality most of us figure things out gradually, responding to new ideas, opportunities, and sometimes difficult experiences that shape the questions we decide to pursue.
If there’s one message I hope this story communicates, it’s that you don’t need a perfectly planned path to become a researcher. Curiosity, persistence, collaboration, and a willingness to adapt will take you much farther than a perfectly scripted career plan.
And if this blog post didn’t make much sense, you can blame the book that taught me how to write them: Blog Posts for Dummies.