Deanna L. Wilkinson's Homepage

Welcome to Dr. Deanna L. Wilkinson' s Homepage

Biographical Note: Deanna L. Wilkinson is currently Associate Professor in the Department of Human Development and Family Science in the College of Education and Human Ecology at The Ohio State University, where she was appointed in 2006. She is also an affiliated faculty with Criminal Justice Research Center at OSU, the John Glenn School of Public Affairs, and the Center for Injury Research and Policy at Columbus Children's Hospital. Before that she held her first faculty post in the Department of Criminal Justice at Temple University in Philadelphia, PA from 1998-2005. Wilkinson worked as a research associate at the Center for Violence Research and Prevention at Columbia University in New York from 1995-1998. She was the first Chicago-based research employee on the now famous Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods study. Professor Wilkinson has directed several large-scale research projects. She earned her Ph.D. from the School of Criminal Justice at Rutgers University, her Masters of Arts in Criminal Justice from the University of Illinois at Chicago, and her Bachelor's degree in Sociology from Cornell College in Mt. Vernon, Iowa. She was raised in the small rural town Capron, IL and was the first person in her family to attend college. She lives outside Columbus, Ohio with her husband, Associate Professor of Bioengineering Keith Gooch, and two young children.

Her primary research and teaching interests are adolescent development, risk and problem behaviors, youth violence, firearm use, prevention, event perspectives, community-police partnerships, program evaluation, and urban communities. Jeff Grabmeier, OSU press writer, recently wrote a story on her recent Justice Quarterly article about the breakdown of informal social control in distressed urban neighborhoods. She is author of the book, Guns, Violence and Identity: Among African American and Latino Youth (LFB Scholarly Publications, 2003). Wilkinson has published her work in Crime and Justice Annual Review, Justice Quarterly, Injury Prevention, Advances in Criminological Theory, Aggression and Violent Behavior, Law and Contemporary Problems, Violence in American Schools, Sociological Studies of Children and Youth, Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency, and Crime and Delinquency. She has received funding for her research from the National Institute of Justice, the William Penn Foundation, the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, the National Science Foundation, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the Illinois Criminal Justice Information Authority. She is the 2008 recipient of the Society for Research on Adolescence Young Investigator Award.

She is actively involved in several local initiatives to reduce youth violence and improve neighborhood safety including serving as a board member to Strategies against Violence Everywhere (SAVE), an advisor to the Africentric Personal Development Shop's Collective Action for Youth and Neighborhood Development’ (CAYND) ambassadors’ program, and a member of Mayor Coleman’s Neighborhood Safety Working Group. She has recently partnered with 22 local criminal justice, social service, and community leaders to develop new strategies for intervening with high risk youth. The OSU Youth Violence Prevention Advisory Board started as a forum for assisting Professor Wilkinson in figuring out how better to translate her research findings for law enforcement, service delivery and prevention. The group plans to continue working together on strategic planning around youth violence reduction and prevention to make a lasting community impact. She also served on the 2012 Columbus Bicentennial Commission Safety Focus Group.