Joel Fein MD, MPH

Associate Professor of Pediatrics and Emergency Medicine The University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine Director, The Philadelphia Collaborative Violence Prevention Center Attending Physician, The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia

Joel Fein, MD, MPH, is committed to preventing youth violence in Philadelphia, one community at a time. As Director and Principal Investigator of the Philadelphia Collaborative Violence Prevention Center (PCVPC), he partners with researchers from Temple University, Drexel University, The University of Pennsylvania, and the Philadelphia Area Research Community Coalition (PARCC) to gather, create, and evaluate programs designed to stop youth violence in West and Southwest Philadelphia.

Established in 2006 as part of the Center for Injury Research and Prevention at CHOP, PCVPC is one of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Urban Partnership Academic Centers of Excellence and the first to be based in Philadelphia.

"Our overall vision is to reduce violent injury and exposure in West and Southwest Philadelphia. But our goals and objectives are more specific," says Dr. Fein. “For example, in the future we would like the Center to serve as an information resource about violence and violence prevention for researchers and also for community members. Most important, we want to create effective interventions that can be sustained locally.”

A pediatric emergency medicine physician at CHOP with research interests in violence prevention, mental health, and pain management in children and adolescents, Dr. Fein also chairs the board of directors of the Institute for Safe Families and is on the board of the Philadelphia Anti-Drug Anti-Violence Network.

"As an ER doctor and researcher, I’m also working to bring violence prevention and mental health promotion into the medical arena by developing tools and pathways that ER physicians can really use. For example, through federal grant funding we developed a self-administered computerized behavioral health screening for adolescents who visit the ER," he explains. "In our research using this tool we discovered that some teenagers who are suicidal came to the ER for supposedly non-psychiatric reasons. Today, although the grant has ended, we still use this tool as a standard of care in the ER. What drives me in the work that I do is how to practically fill the voids in the safety net."

Fein's body of work complements and builds on the Center’s research and outreach that focuses on primary prevention. Instead of reacting to violence, PCVPC aims to positively impact a child, family, or community to keep violence at bay.

Contact Information
Ayana Bradshaw, MPH - Center Director The Philadelphia Collaborative Violence Prevention Center (PCVPC)
3535 Market Street, Suite 1150
Philadelphia, PA 19104 215.590.3118
pcvpc@email.chop.edu