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Speaker Bios

Neil Bonavita

Neil Bonavita

Neil Bonavita currently serves as Director of Student Services for Hays Consolidated Independent School District. In that capacity he has, among his varied duties, oversight responsibility for districtwide safety and security. In addition to holding an undergraduate degree in history from Portland State University, Mr. Bonavita earned his Doctor of Jurisprudence degree from South Texas College of Law and his post-baccalaureate administrator’s certification from Texas State University in San Marcos.


David Esquith

David Esquith

David Esquith is the Director of the U.S. Department of Education's Office of Safe and Healthy Students located within the Office of Elementary and Secondary Education. Mr. Esquith is a former Peace Corps volunteer, special education teacher, lobbyist for the Arc (previously the Association for Retarded Citizens), and Congressional aide.


Dr. Nadine P. Frederique

Dr. Nadine P. Frederique

Dr. Nadine P. Frederique is a Senior Social Science Analyst in the Office of Research and Evaluation at the National Institute of Justice (NIJ). At NIJ, her work includes implementing innovative reentry programs, developing a research program around the right to counsel, and improving defense counsel practitioners’ use of research. Presently, Dr. Frederique is working on NIJ’s Comprehensive School Safety Initiative (CSSI) to improve the safety of our nation’s schools and students through rigorous research that produces practical knowledge. This work is accomplished through partnerships with educators, researchers, and stakeholders from other disciplines such as law enforcement and behavioral and mental health professionals.


Dr.Paul Hirschfield

Dr.Paul Hirschfield

Dr.Paul Hirschfield is an Associate Professor of Sociology at Rutgers University and an Affiliated Professor in the Program in Criminal Justice. His research has focused on the causes and consequences of intensified surveillance and criminalization of American youth, especially in schools. His central policy interests in the educational area are programs that facilitate the transition from correctional to community educational settings and recent efforts across the USA to expand positive and restorative alternatives to exclusionary discipline and to reduce schools’ reliance upon police. Dr. Hirschfield’s work has been published in American Educational Research Journal, Criminology, Sociology of Education, Theoretical Criminology, and Youth Violence and Juvenile Justice.


Walter E. Horton Jr

Walter E. Horton Jr, Ph.D.
Associate Vice President for Research and Sponsored Programs and Chief Research Officer, Texas State University

Prior to joining Texas State, Dr. Horton served as the Vice President for Research and Dean of the College of Graduate Studies at the Northeast Ohio Medical University. Dr. Horton has an outstanding reputation as a scientist and scholar working in the area of arthritis research. He has served as a full member of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Skeletal Biology Development and Disease study section and currently serves on NIH review panels focused on commercializing research findings. Dr. Horton began his career working in drug discovery for Eli Lilly and Company and then led an intramural research program at the National Institute on Aging, NIH.

Dr. Horton earned his B.Sc. in zoology, cum laude, from Kent State University and his Ph.D. in anatomy and cell biology from the University of Cincinnati. He was awarded a National Research Service postdoctoral fellowship from the NIH in the area of molecular biology.


Emily Morgan

Emily Morgan

Emily Morgan is a project manager at the Council of State Governments Justice Center, conceptualizing and coordinating strategies for a portfolio of special youth projects. Currently, Ms. Morgan is managing projects to support state and local policymakers in advancing school discipline reforms and improving outcomes for young adults in the justice system. She has written a number of publications on these subjects and was the lead author of the School Discipline Consensus Report, a comprehensive roadmap of school discipline improvement strategies for state and local leaders. She has extensive experience in education and youth development policy and practice. Prior to joining the Justice Center, Ms. Morgan served as national policy coordinator for Every Hour Counts, a national coalition of citywide organizations, where she managed grant initiatives to build quality sustainable, expanded learning systems. She was also a program officer at the Institute of International Education, where she managed Fulbright Foreign Student grantees in education graduate programs. Ms. Morgan is a former elementary school teacher and received a BS in education from Vanderbilt University and an EdM in education policy from Columbia University.


Dr. Anthony Petrosino

Dr. Anthony Petrosino

Dr. Anthony Petrosino is Director of the Justice & Prevention Research Center at WestEd and Senior Research Fellow at the George Mason University Center for Evidence-based Crime Policy. He has over 30 years of experience collaborating on studies relevant to school safety, violence prevention, and juvenile and criminal justice and has co-authored nearly 200 reports, articles, and book chapters as well as editing books and monographs.


Dr. Joseph Whitmeyer

Dr. Joseph Whitmeyer

Joseph Whitmeyer has served as Director for the Sociology Program in the Division of Social and Economic Sciences within the Directorate of Social, Behavioral, and Economic Science at the National Science Foundation since July 2017. He earned a PhD in Sociology at the University of Washington in 1993 and a second PhD in Applied Mathematics at UNC Charlotte in 2010. From 1993 through 2017, he was Assistant Professor, Associate Professor, and Professor at UNC Charlotte in the Department of Sociology. He has also been a visiting professor at Hokkaido University in Japan, the University of Groningen in the Netherlands, and, in 2016 as a Fulbright Scholar at Jawaharlal Nehru University in India. His research has been largely interdisciplinary, concerned with modeling complex social systems.