Rep. Henry Cuellar announced Wednesday with TAMIU that the university would receive $435,020 in federal funds for their work in studying gang violence in New Jersey.

According to Cuellar, the funding will allow TAMIU professors along with graduate and undergraduate researchers to participate in the study of the dynamics of guns and gang violence, which is expected to help inform policy makers and law makers in the future. He added that more money has been provided for gun violence research after the removal of a prohibition of prohibition of gun violence research.

The study will be led by Dr. Jared Dmello, Assistant Professor and Project Investigator, and partnered with the University of Massachusetts at Lowell and California State University. It will take place in New Jersey because of the state’s notoriety for gun violence and their spillover effects from gun and gang violence from New York City. The high level of both gang and gun violence is a perfect case study to understand the connection and develop effective data driven tools.

“This research is really going to investigate how gangs use firearms and how this use has evolved in the span of about four decades in the state of New Jersey,” Dmello said. “We’re really interested in how gang use of firearms specifically terrorizes communities, but that spillover effect of when it goes from a private to a public setting and how group composition impacts network violence more broadly.”

Dmello’s lab in TAMIU is still researching gang violence for Texas, Webb County and Laredo, and how it is evolving with a focus on ethnicity instead of the connection of gun and gangs. He adds that while gender and race impacts race and gun violence, there still has not been a systematic study at the state level looking at the connection from the network perspective. The current plan is to work with policymakers and law enforcement to provide data to help reduce gang violence.

TAMIU students will have the opportunity to study under Dmello and learn techniques that would include geospatial social network analysis, analytics to predict the future of networked evolution that may help them in their future academic or professional careers, Dmello said.

“We have brought in the last 10 or 12 years a great young group of faculty members who conduct research on problems that are not specifically surrounding Laredo or Webb County,” TAMIU President Dr. Pablo Arenaz said.