One Alum’s Journey to a Career in Gun Violence Prevention

Emma Cornell, MPH’22, was a college student home for break in a small town in Connecticut when the Sandy Hook school shooting happened in nearby Newtown. As a volunteer EMT, she knew several colleagues who responded to the shooting and saw the impact of vicarious trauma on first responders and the community more broadly. In searching for ways to make sense of that terrible day, she was inspired by local emergency medicine physician William Begg, who spoke passionately about the impact of gun violence on health care.

In college, she interned at Everytown for Gun Safety, where she worked under Ted Alcorn, who was then the organization’s research director and is now an instructor in Columbia Mailman’s Department of Epidemiology. That summer, she worked on a research project that shed light on domestic violence restraining orders, a policy tool designed to limit access to firearms for perpetrators of domestic violence. After graduating, she took a position in an emergency department in Baltimore that regularly treated victims of gun violence. “I saw so many patients impacted directly by gun violence. Something like twice a week, there would be an overhead page that said, ‘Delta trauma, traumatic arrest,’ from a penetrating injury.’ That’s what propelled me into wanting to get a public health degree,” Cornell recalls. 

The obvious choice was Columbia Mailman because it offered a certificate in injury and violence prevention and access to leading experts in gun violence prevention research, such as Ted Alcorn and Charles Branas, the chair of the Department of Epidemiology. Since earning her MPH, she has worked as a senior clinical research program manager and director of the Northwell Hospital-based Violence Intervention Program. Recently, her work was featured in an article in Becker’s Hospital Review about her successful efforts to add a firearm safety screening tool in Epic, the nation’s largest electronic health record system. 

Tell me about this screening. How did it come about? How does it work? 

Since 2020, emergency departments have seen a sharp rise in the number of gunshot wound patients. That number has started to come down, but it’s still quite high. Providers are sick and tired of pulling bullets out of bodies and telling families that they’ve lost a loved one to gun violence. In 2019, Northwell’s CEO at the time, Michael Dowling, took a public stance on gun violence prevention and created our Center for Gun Violence Prevention, which then implemented the screening on our electronic health record system.  

Anytime a patient comes into the emergency department, they’re screened, usually by a nurse. The universal screening is designed to evaluate access to firearms and risk for violence, identify patients at risk for firearm injury, and refer them to hospital-based violence intervention programs. We even provide gun locks and safe firearm storage counseling. So far, we’ve screened over 250,000 patients. Two years ago, in conversation with someone at Epic, I casually suggested that they could make the screening available to providers who use their system. They were interested, and now it’s online!   

How did your time at Columbia Mailman prepare you for what you’re doing? 

I still refer to my notes from a class I took with Professor Helen de Pinho on systems thinking. That class helped me think about how to navigate in a systems space and what levers to pull. My class on program planning and evaluation was equally influential. Within a few months of getting hired, I was asked to start and run a hospital-based violence intervention program. I relied heavily on the readings and notes from that class. And my practicum basically got me my job. I got to work with Dr. Ashley Blanchard, a pediatric emergency medicine physician at Morgan Stanley Children’s Hospital. We looked at a technology that helps parents and caregivers of those who are experiencing suicidal ideation who come into the emergency department for treatment. It walks them through creating a safety plan at home, including how to safely store firearms and medications. She’s been an incredible mentor. 

 I was one of two people in my Mailman cohort who specialized in injury and violence prevention. It was me and Olivia Frank, MPH’22, who we actually hired to work at our Center for Gun Violence Prevention. She’s amazing. We basically did the same curriculum. I know what her capabilities are and how her brain works. I’m very grateful to Mailman for training us the same way, because it’s enabled us to be incredibly efficient at our jobs.