Before the attack: what we are learning about preventing public violence Paul Wilkinson Memorial Lecture with guest speaker Professor Jessica Stern

Public violence, including mass public shootings and terrorist attacks, accounts for a very small fraction of overall homicide, yet it produces an outsized psychological and social impact, reshaping how people experience public space, safety and one another. The radius of psychological injury far exceeds that of physical harm.

Research shows that warning signs are often visible to family members, peers or institutions well before an attack occurs. In this talk, Jessica Stern, research professor at Boston University, argues that the dominant response to public violence remains largely punitive and reactive, despite decades of evidence indicating that early intervention is often both possible and effective. Drawing on her research team's recent evaluations of secondary and tertiary prevention efforts, the talk explores what is known, and what remains uncertain, about preventing acts of public violence.

As well as a research professor, Jessica is a senior fellow at both the Center for Naval Analysis and the Community Safety Branch at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, and was selected as a Harry Frank Guggenheim Distinguished Scholar for 2024-2025. She has taught courses on counterterrorism for more than 25 years at Boston University, Harvard and CIA University.

Jessica served as a member of the National Academy of Sciences Committee on preventing nuclear terrorism and advises numerous government agencies. Her research has been funded by the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Justice, the National Science Foundation, NATO and the MacArthur Foundation, among others. Her current book, under contract with Harvard University Press, is Public Violence: The Public Health Approach to Prevention. She is also coauthor, with J.M. Berger, of ISIS: The State of Terror and the author of My War Criminal: Personal Encounters with an Architect of Genocide, Denial: A Memoir of Terror, Terror in the Name of God, and The Ultimate Terrorists.

Jessica served on President Clinton's National Security Council Staff and was included among seven “thinkers” in Time Magazine‘s 2001 series profiling 100 innovators. She was selected as a John Simon Guggenheim Fellow in 2009, a World Economic Forum Fellow from 2002 to 2004, an International Affairs Fellow in 1994, and elected to Sigma Xi, an engineering honors society, in 1986. She earned a doctorate in public policy at Harvard University and is a 2016 graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Psychoanalysis.

Photo of Jessica Stern by Margaret Lampert.