Congratulations Laura Prater, PhD, MPH, MHA! Dr. Prater’s award/grant “Engaging Machine Learning and Data Linkage to Understand Firearm Suicide Among Females,” was funded by the National Collaborative on Gun Violence Research. Dr. Prater was awarded $146,290 (over one year) for this study.
Her project will focus on firearm suicides among females. Suicide has been the leading cause of death for American females through middle age and has been increasing since 2008. Firearms are responsible for approximately 50% of all suicides and are overwhelmingly the most lethal method. In this project, Dr. Prater, Dr. Miriam Haviland, and Dr. Steve Mooney will empirically classify female firearm suicides into mutually exclusive typologies and report demographic and health care utilization patterns across these groups.
This study will use the National Violent Death Reporting System (NVDRS) and the Washington Violent Death Reporting System (WA-VDRS) to develop and implement a Natural Language Processing (NLP) approach to better understand and contextualize female firearm suicide. Using an NLP-enhanced WA-VDRS linked to multiple state-level administrative datasets, we will examine demographic and health care utilization patterns between cases.