Dr. Vivek Ashok is an Assistant Professor of Pediatrics at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center, dual-trained in internal medicine and pediatrics. His work focuses on developing and evaluating community- and health system–partnered strategies to prevent violence, advancing accurate and equitable narratives around firearm injury on social media, improving the implementation of policies governing firearm access, and translating evidence into advocacy through broad, cross-sector coalitions to promote secure firearm storage.

At Rush Medical College in Chicago, he steered his school’s Student Against Gun Violence organization and invited community violence prevention experts to speak to students. He completed his residency at the University of Pittsburgh. There, he co-chaired the pediatrics residency advocacy group at the Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh and became an Advocacy Committee Member for the Pennsylvania Chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics. Through these opportunities, he has collaborated with statewide firearm violence prevention organization to pass evidence-based legislation in Pennsylvania. 

His research interests include improving implementation of extreme risk protection orders among physicians, understanding the language surrounding firearm related violence, and building a data narrative to disentangle firearm violence from mental illness. Additionally, he is interested in applying restorative justice practices to clinical medicine.