Thomas Abt

Thomas Abt is the Founding Director of the Center for the Study and Practice of Violence Reduction (VRC) and an associate research professor in the Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice at the University of Maryland. He teaches, studies, and advises on evidence-informed approaches to reducing violence in the United States and globally, and is the author of Bleeding Out: The Devastating Consequences of Urban Violence—and a Bold New Plan for Peace in the Streets. His work is cited in academic journals and featured in outlets including the Atlantic, The Economist, the New Yorker, the New York Times, the Washington Post, CBS, CNN, MSNBC, and NPR, and his TED talk on community violence has been viewed more than 200,000 times. Abt serves as a Senior Fellow with the Council on Criminal Justice, where he previously chaired its Violent Crime Working Group. Prior to that, he was a Senior Fellow at Harvard's Kennedy and Law Schools, and before Harvard he served as Deputy Secretary for Public Safety to Governor Andrew Cuomo in New York, where he led the development of the state's GIVE (Gun-Involved Violence Elimination) Initiative. Earlier in his career, he served as Chief of Staff to the Office of Justice Programs at the United States Department of Justice, where he helped establish the National Forum on Youth Violence Prevention.