Welcome, Andrea Cimino

The Johns Hopkins Center for Suicide Prevention is glad to welcome Andrea Cimino, PhD, MSW, LMSW, to the team.

Andrea is a social scientist whose research examines how violence and trauma affect suicide and homicide risk. She works through a socioecological lens, which means looking at the whole picture around a person: their own experiences, their relationships, their community and the systems they encounter. Her work gives particular attention to intimate partner violence, sexual and gender minority populations, and people affected by the criminal legal system.

Connecting violence and suicide prevention

Andrea's work asks what suicide and interpersonal violence may have in common, and what that could mean for prevention.

At the Center, she is working on psychological autopsy research that examines shared risk and protective factors linking suicide and interpersonal violence, including gender-based violence. A psychological autopsy study learns about the life of a person who died, often through conversations with family members and others who knew them, to understand what might have helped. Looking at violence and suicide together may reveal opportunities for prevention that neither field would see alone.

Experience across many settings

Andrea brings more than 15 years of experience leading interdisciplinary violence research across academic, nonprofit, military and criminal legal settings. She remains affiliated with the Danger Assessment Training and Technical Assistance Center at the Johns Hopkins School of Nursing.

Her recent work includes Fatal Peril, a 2024 report from the Stanford Criminal Justice Center that she co-authored. The study surveyed women held for homicide-related offenses in California's two women's prisons. Among the 625 respondents who were in a relationship, 74.2% reported experiencing intimate partner violence in the year prior. Of those, 66.4% were in extreme danger as measured by the Danger Assessment, a tool used to assess the risk of intimate partner homicide.

She is also a co-author of a 2026 study in Research in Nursing & Health, led by Dr. Athena D. F. Sherman of Emory University, that examined depression, PTSD and suicide risk among Black transgender women.

Why it matters

Violence and trauma touch many lives, and they do not stop at the boundaries between research fields. Bringing that understanding into suicide prevention can help the field design support that reaches people who have lived through violence.

Please join us in welcoming Andrea to the Center.