Deanna Wilkinson

Deanna L. Wilkinson is currently Associate Professor in the Department of Human Sciences in the College of Education and Human Ecology at The Ohio State University, where she was appointed in January of 2006. She is also an affiliated faculty with Criminal Justice Research Center at OSU, the John Glenn School of Public Affairs, the Bell National Resource Center on the African American Male, the Kirwan Institute, and the Center for Injury Research and Policy at Nationwide Children’s Hospital in Columbus. Before that she held her first faculty post in the Department of Criminal Justice at Temple University in Philadelphia, PA from 1998-2005.

Dr. Wilkinson is a criminologist and expert on urban youth violence, illegal firearms use, community processes, and violence prevention. She is author of two books: Guns, Violence and Identity among African American and Latino Youth and Event Dynamics and the Role of Third Parties in Urban Youth Violence. Professor Wilkinson 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; grew up on welfare; and was the first person in her family to attend college. She lives outside Columbus, Ohio with her husband, Professor of Biomedical Engineering Keith Gooch, and two teenage sons.