Howard Pinderhughes, PhD,
 will headline the 2018 National Health Care for the Homeless Conference & Policy Symposium as our opening keynote speaker. Dr. Pinderhughes is Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences at the University of California, San Francisco. He is the author of Race in the Hood: Conflict and Violence Among Urban Youth which examined the dynamics of racial violence in New York City. Dr. Pinderhughes has been conducting research on youth violence and violence prevention in the SF Bay Area communities since 1989. Dr. Pinderhughes worked with Alameda County to produce the Alameda County Blueprint for Violence Prevention and with the City of San Francisco to co-author their Comprehensive Violence Prevention Plan in 2007. Dr. Pinderhughes is a lead partner with the UNITY Initiative (Urban Networks to Increase Thriving Youth), a CDC-funded initiative on violence prevention in the 30 of the largest cities in the United States. He has worked with Boston, Cleveland, Chicago, Minneapolis, Seattle, Oakland, Baltimore, Milwaukee and Los Angeles on their development and implementation of comprehensive violence prevention plans. Additionally, he served as Co-PI for the Center on Culture, Immigration and Youth Violence Prevention.
Currently, Dr. Pinderhughes is working on a Kaiser-funded study of the impact of violence on communities and has developed a groundbreaking framework to understand community trauma and inform strategies to reduce violence and increase community resiliency. Dr. Pinderhughes’ forthcoming book, Dealing With Danger: How Inner-City Youth Cope with the Violence that Surrounds Them, examines how urban youth in the Bay Area experience various types of violence and the effects of trauma from exposure to interpersonal and structural violence on both these youth and their communities.