Nathan Aguilar

Dr. Nathan Aguilar is a Provost’s Postdoctoral Faculty Fellow/Assistant Professor at NYU Silver School of Social Work. His research is informed by nearly a decade of performing community and hospital-based violence intervention as well as clinical therapy with gang involved individuals and gunshot survivors in Chicago and Brooklyn.

Leveraging his experience, Dr. Aguilar collaborates with violence intervention organizations and interdisciplinary scholars to develop participatory research projects. Together, they aim to understand the effects of gun violence on male and female survivors, their family members, and outreach workers. Dr. Aguilar’s future research will translate descriptive knowledge from these participatory research projects to intervention efforts that can improve social work practices aimed at reducing community-based gun violence.

Dr. Aguilar completed his PhD at Columbia School of Social Work, his MSW from Washington University in St. Louis and his BS in Business Management from the University of Colorado Denver.

Aspholm, R., Aguilar, N., St. Vil, C. (2024). Deaths of Despair in Black and White: Gun Violence, Political Economy, and the Case for Macro Intervention. Advances in Social Work, 24(1).

Aguilar, N., Landau, A.Y., Taylor, K.A., Kleiner. S. & Patton, D.U. (2024). Digital Mourning in Tweets: Multi-Modal Analysis of Image-Based Grieving Practices among Gang-Affiliated Black Youth. New Media and Society. 

Bocanegra, K., Aguilar, N. (2024). “We’re Not Miracle Workers”: An Examination of the Relationship Between Community Violence Intervention Workers and Their Participants. Families in Society. 

Aguilar, N., Wical, W., Orozco, J., Bullock, C., Richardson J., B. (2023). Silent Suffering: Understanding the Experiences of Black Caregivers of Violently Injured Young Black Men. Journal of the Society for Social Work & Research. “Just Accepted" preprint version. 

Aguilar, N., Landau, A., Mathiyazhagan, S., Auyeng, A., Dillard, S., Patton, D. (2023). Applying Reflexivity to Artificial Intelligence for Researching Marginalized Communities and Real-World Problems. In Proceedings of the 56th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences. 

Patton, D. U., Aguilar, N., Landau, A. Y., Thomas, C., Kagan, R., Ren, T., Stoneberg, E., Wang, T., Halmos, D., Saha, A., Ananthram, A., & McKeown, K. (2022). Community implications for gun violence prevention during co-occurring pandemics; a qualitative and computational analysis study. Preventive Medicine, 107263. 

Wical, W., Harfouche, M., Lovelady, N., Aguilar, N., Ross, D., & Richardson, J. B. (2022). Exploring emergent barriers to hospital-based violence intervention programming during the COVID-19 pandemic. Preventive Medicine, 107232. Advance online publication.

Winter, S. C., Obara, L. M., Aguilar, N. J., & Johnson, L. (2021). Breaking the Cycle: Women’s Perceptions of the Causes of Violence and Crime in Informal Settlements in Nairobi, Kenya, and Their Strategies for Response and Prevention. Journal of Interpersonal Violence. 37(19-20), NP17394-NP17428. 

Winter, S. C., Aguilar, N. J., Obara, L. M., & Johnson, L. (2021). “Next, it will be you”: Women’s Fear of Victimization and Precautionary Safety Behaviors in Informal Settlement Communities in Nairobi, Kenya. Violence Against Women. 28(12-13), 2966-2991. 

Sodhi, A., Aguilar, N., Choma, D. E., Steve, J. M., Patton, D., & Crandall, M. (2020). Social Media Representations of Law Enforcement within Four Diverse Chicago Neighborhoods. Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, 089124162094329. 

Bellamy, C., Kimmel, J., Costa, M., Tsai, J., Nulton, L., Nulton, E., Kimmel, A., Aguilar, N., Clayton, A. and O’Connell, M. (2019), Peer support on the “inside and outside”: building lives and reducing recidivism for people with mental illness returning from jail. Journal of Public Mental Health,18(3), 188-198.