Dr. Eric Madfis is Professor and Director of the Violence Prevention and Transformation Research Collaborative in the School of Social Work and Criminal Justice at the University of Washington Tacoma. He is a sociologist and criminologist whose research examines the causes and prevention of school violence, hate/bias crime, and mass shootings. He earned his Ph.D. in Sociology from Northeastern University in Boston, where he served as a Research Associate at the Brudnick Center on Violence and Conflict. Dr. Madfis regularly teaches courses on Criminal Homicide, Criminological Theory, School Safety, Sociology of Deviance and Social Control, Juvenile Justice, and Diversity and Social Justice.

His scholarship has been widely published in leading academic journals across multiple disciplines and has been featured in major national and international media outlets. Dr. Madfis has presented his research to audiences across the country and around the world—including briefings before the United States Congress. His work on school shooting prevention directly informed Washington State legislation mandating non-biased behavioral threat assessment procedures in all public schools.

He is the author of How to Stop School Rampage Killing: Lessons from Averted Mass Shootings and Bombings and co-editor of All-American Massacre: The Tragic Role of American Culture and Society in Mass Shootings. His current research employs both qualitative and quantitative methods to lead the first empirical studies of the Salem-Keizer Cascade Threat Assessment Model, a framework adopted in schools throughout the Pacific Northwest and beyond.