In unity against gun violence, UB and MSU invite peer medical schools to join them at Remembrance Conference 2025

BUFFALO, N.Y. — In the wake of mass casualty tragedies on and near their campuses, two medical schools have formed a partnership aimed at engaging other medical schools in meaningfully addressing the crisis of gun violence in the U.S. through a public health lens.

Since 2023, faculty, staff and students at the Jacobs School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences at the University at Buffalo and the Michigan State University College of Human Medicine have been gathering in Buffalo and in East Lansing to honor the lives each community has lost and to engage medical students and physicians in joining together to address gun violence.

From June 6-8, they will gather for Remembrance Conference 2025, this time in Buffalo hosted by the Jacobs School, the third time the schools are hosting this exchange. The conference is open to medical school faculty, residents and students nationwide.

On Saturday afternoon (June 7), the conference focus will turn to community engagement; this session will be free and open to the public.

The exchange between the campuses began when the deans of both medical schools attended an Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) talk on gun violence. Both schools had recently experienced mass shootings on or near their campuses.

In May 2023, the MSU group traveled to Buffalo to support the UB community as the city observed memorials marking a year since the 2022 racist massacre at the Tops supermarket killed 10 people and injured three. Then last February, the UB group traveled to East Lansing to support the MSU community marking a year since a gunman killed three people on campus and injured five.

“As physicians and students providing care in local hospitals, we bear witness to the trauma that gun violence inflicts upon our communities every day,” says Allison Brashear, MD, UB vice president for health sciences and dean of the Jacobs School. “The core mission of academic medicine is to improve the health and well-being of our communities. The Jacobs School and the MSU College of Human Medicine are resolute in their mission to educate and advocate against the scourge of gun violence.”

While the conference evolved out of two mass casualty events, the organizers are quick to point out that only about 1% of shootings in the U.S. are mass shootings, while domestic violence, accidental shootings, suicides and firearms not properly secured all far outstrip mass shootings.

“What we’re doing with this Remembrance Conference is a beautiful occurrence that came out of the most tragic circumstance,” says Kinzer Pointer, PhD, pastor of Buffalo’s Liberty Missionary Baptist Church, a member of UB’s Clinical and Translational Science Award Community Advisory Board and a conference organizer.

He says the nation’s medical schools are a logical place to focus a movement to prevent gun violence.

“Physicians are the ones who have to deal with the result of gun violence,” he says. “They’re on the front line and are often traumatized in their work by what comes before them in the emergency department. The violence is so pervasive, if you’re a trauma surgeon, you’ve seen it more times than you can count. If we can help medical students better understand gun violence, then we can create advocates against gun violence for the whole nation. It’s going to require a movement.”

The conference will feature keynote speakers, advocacy sessions and community engagement activities. It will also include workshops focused on cultivating curricular and clinical experiences in medical school aimed at preventing gun violence.

The keynote speakers are:

·       Megan Ranney, MD, dean of the Yale School of Public Health and C.-E. A. Winslow Professor of Public Health and professor of emergency medicine. She is co-founder and senior strategic adviser for the American Foundation for Firearm Injury Reduction in Medicine (AFFIRM) at the Aspen Institute, a nonprofit committed to ending the gun violence epidemic through a non-partisan public health approach.

·       Robert Gore, MD, clinical assistant professor of emergency medicine at SUNY Downstate Medical Center and a Jacobs School alumnus. Gore is founder and executive director of the Kings Against Violence Initiative (KAVI), a youth violence prevention program, for which he was named a Top 10 CNN Hero in 2018. He is the author of “Treating Violence: An Emergency Room Doctor Takes on a Deadly American Epidemic.”

·       Zeneta B. Everhart, Masten District Council Member. Following the May 14 massacre that seriously injured her son, Zaire, Everhart testified before Congress about the need for stricter gun laws, resulting in the passage of the Safer Communities Act, the first piece of gun legislation in more than 30 years. With her son, she created Zeneta & Zaire’s Book Club, which teaches children about racism, diversity and building a more inclusive society.

·       Patricia Logan-Greene, PhD, associate professor and associate dean for academic affairs in the UB School of Social Work, who is co-leader of the national Grand Challenge in Social Work to Prevent Gun Violence, which has led to funding by the Department of Homeland Security on training behavioral health professionals in the prevention of violent extremism. In her research, she takes a trauma-informed approach to violence, childhood adversity and system responses to maltreatment and delinquency.

The Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) sponsored last year’s event at MSU and is sponsoring this year’s Remembrance Conference at UB. Other sponsors include The Ohio State University, the University of New Mexico and the College of Medicine at California Northstate University.

Sponsorship information is available at Remembrance Conference 2025 Sponsorship Commitment.