The National Institutes of Health awarded $5 million to 20 researchers across 12 universities and health systems to study gun deaths among children and teens — the largest grant for gun research in two decades.
The funding, which technically comes from NIH's National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, is a five-year grant that allows for the creation of a consortium around the research, called the Firearm-safety Among Children & Teens Consortium. It will include researchers from the following institutions:
- University of Michigan (Ann Arbor)
- Michigan State University (East Lansing)
- Rhode Island Hospital/Brown University (Providence, R.I.)
- University of Washington (Seattle)
- Arizona State School of Criminology & Criminal Justice (Phoenix)
- Columbia University (New York)
- Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health (Boston)
- Medical College of Wisconsin (Milwaukee)
- University of Pennsylvania (Philadelphia)
- University of Colorado School of Medicine (Aurora)
- Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children's Hospital of Chicago/Northwestern University
- Children's National Health System (Washington, D.C.)
The consortium will also engage with stakeholders, from gun owners to teachers and parent groups. The money will go toward creating an agenda for research into pediatric firearm injury, generating preliminary data for potential larger investigations, creating a data archive on childhood gun injury, and training new researchers and providing educational resources on gun injury science.
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