Rebecca Cunningham

Cunningham is the former Director of the U-M Injury Prevention Center, one of ten U.S. injury control research centers funded by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to address urgent injury issues through research, education and outreach. She also leads a consortium of 25 researchers across 12 universities and health systems that aim to improve firearms safety through an injury prevention approach. The Firearm Safety Among Children and Teens Consortium represented a historic funding commitment from the National Institutes of Health to reduce firearm injury.

Her focus on Firearm injury Prevention as well as brief interventions in the emergency room and health systems has included using technology to overcome barriers to reaching youth to prevent substance use and violent injury ( SafERTeens intervention), and longitudinal studies of youth seeking ED care with assault injury ( including firearm injury). She is the PI of the 2017 NICHD funded Firearm-Safety Among Children & Teens Consortium (FACTS). This grant brings together firearm researchers across the country to build capacity in this field by their collective work to: 1) Generate of a research agenda for firearm injury among children; 2) conduct innovative firearm prevention science; 3)create a data repository to enhance analysis and access to firearm data; and to train postdoctoral fellows in the science of firearm injury prevention.

In 2019, Cunningham was elected to the National Academy of Medicine, the highest honorary society in the U.S. for researchers in medicine and health. The Society for Academic Emergency Medicine and the American College of Emergency Physicians both awarded Cunningham with Excellence in Research Awards in 2019.