Alison Culyba

Dr. Alison Culyba's research seeks to understand factors that protect youth from violence using novel methodological approaches to study the role of family, community, and environmental factors in protecting youth and translating these findings into community-based interventions. Identifying strengths-based strategies that reduce violence and allow adolescents to thrive guides Dr. Culyba's research program. Through the University of Pittsburgh Clinical and Translational Science Scholars Program (CTS KL2), Dr. Culyba's current work focuses on strengthening adolescent-adult connections to reduce youth violence. She applies novel hierarchical clustering techniques, conducts semi-structured interviews, and models social networks to study associations between adolescent-adult connections and multiple forms of violence victimization and perpetration in a diverse, community-based sample of Pittsburgh youth. Dr. Culyba also investigates novel methods to study how the physical environment shapes violence risk.