On the evening of Saturday, Dec. 13, 2025, as emergency medicine teams at Rhode Island Hospital tended to the bodily injuries of the nine surviving Brown students shot by a gunman who was still at large, a team of administrators was already zeroing in on how best to address the psychological wounds that would inevitably mark the entire Brown community.

Most pressing was the realization that, while students would soon leave campus for winter break, medical students would return in early January and online Winter Session classes would begin in late December, mere weeks later. “The questions before us were, what should faculty say on the first day? How do we talk about this? How do we show up for each other?” says Matthew Guterl, PhD, P’26, P’28, Brown’s vice president for diversity and inclusion.

They didn’t have to wonder for long: the University’s faculty includes several prominent trauma experts who are singularly qualified to develop a thoughtful, scientifically sound response that would guide the University through the aftermath.

Within hours of the shooting, Guterl’s team reached out to Francesca Beaudoin RES’10 F’15 PhD’17, MD, then the academic dean of Brown’s School of Public Health. A national expert on opioid use disorders, Beaudoin is a clinical epidemiologist and emergency medicine physician with experience in and deep knowledge of trauma and disaster response. She served as a lead co-investigator on a $21 million nationwide research initiative launched in 2016 by the National Institutes of Health that deepened our understanding of the severe after-effects of trauma.

“Twelve to 24 hours after the shooting, recovery was far from people’s minds,” says Beaudoin, who is now the dean of the School of Public Health. “But from my time in the emergency department dealing with life-threatening incidents and responses to violence and my work in mental health, I knew we had to start thinking about recovery in parallel with the incident.”

It was also vital to bring a public health approach to that recovery, one that would encompass the entire campus while extending beyond it. “When something like this happens, the ripple effects are far reaching in a way that we don’t always think about in the moment,” Beaudoin says. “The first responders, the hospitals that received the patients, all of those people have the potential need for support. You’ve also got people in the community with preexisting mental health conditions … and people who have already been a victim of a mass violence incident.”

Getting It Right

That same evening, clinical psychologist Nicole Nugent F’09, PhD, a professor of psychiatry and human behavior, of emergency medicine, and of pediatrics at Brown and a highly involved member of the International Society of Traumatic Stress Studies, watched her inbox fill with emails containing advice and materials from fellow trauma specialists all over the globe. She heard from Alyssa Rheingold, PhD, director of response, recovery, and resilience for the National Mass Violence Center (NMVC), a federally funded program based at the Medical University of South Carolina that provides consultation, support, and resources to communities impacted by mass violence. Melissa Brymer, PhD, director of terrorism and disaster programs at the National Child Traumatic Stress Network, an organization created by Congress in 2000 to improve care and provide training in trauma-informed interventions, also reached out.

Nugent immediately began disseminating the information to “anyone I knew in leadership,” she says. “As a field, we know what works for posttraumatic treatment. I wanted to make sure these resources were out there so folks knew what was evidence based and what were the supports available to us.” Then she let people know, “If I can serve in any way, just tell me. I’m here.”

By Monday morning, Beaudoin and Nugent were among the 30 or so people in the incident command meeting convened by Rhode Island’s Executive Office of Health and Human Services to assess and begin scaling up the state’s behavioral health resources while ensuring coordination among all involved entities, such as community mental health centers and Family Service of Rhode Island. In the daily calls that followed, Beaudoin continued to serve as the liaison between incident command and Brown.

‘Flood the Zone’

Meanwhile, Guterl and colleagues were receiving guidance from administrators at other schools that had undergone mass shootings, including Florida State University, Northern Illinois University, and the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.

“They told us to flood the zone. You’re trying to let your community know what to watch out for in themselves, in others, and where to go once they’ve identified something,” he says. “You’ve got to create a public health dragnet so people are informed.”

But, he adds, “most people don’t know a ton about trauma. We don’t have a socialized understanding of what trauma does in the way that we do about depression. Most people know trauma primarily through a general understanding of PTSD, or through war films, and that’s not useful for us.”

Nugent, on the other hand, has spent her career focusing on facilitating resilience after trauma and on understanding how the interplay of biological and social factors affects psychological outcomes. When she came to Brown as a child psychology postdoc, in 2007, she started and co-chaired a disaster mental health group for colleagues at Brown’s affiliated hospitals. In 2014, she co-authored an article in the Journal of Psychotraumatology titled “Resilience after trauma: from surviving to thriving,” which urged that “the study of resilience … be the central goal for researchers and clinicians in the field of traumatic stress studies.” Today, as director of psychological services at Hasbro Refugee Clinic, she regularly works with children and families who have survived war and mass violence, and she teaches Psychology of Resilience, a course for high-school students in the Summer@Brown program.

For Nugent, providing the community with “broad psychoeducation around disaster mental health” was paramount. Her most urgent concerns were twofold. First, the response to the shooting must deploy the latest in research-informed interventions, such as psychological first aid (PFA), a supportive and practical approach to alleviating distress and fostering coping behaviors in those affected by disaster. Second, it must avoid possible hazards, such as psychological debriefing, which, when deployed as a forced intervention within hours to days of a trauma, has the potential for deleterious effects on some survivors’ mental health.

Another priority was informing people about important “reminder moments” to come, and about the phases a community commonly goes through following a disaster—heroic, honeymoon, disillusionment, reconstruction—so that appropriate supports could be put in place.

Even before Jan. 5, 2026, when Brown President Christina H. Paxson unveiled Brown Ever True, the campuswide “roadmap to recovery,” Nugent, Guterl, and Beaudoin had begun to craft what would become Resiliency After, a holistic, carefully calibrated, trauma-informed initiative designed to foster healing by helping people understand trauma and its aftermath and teaching adaptive behaviors. In that first, acute phase in December, they wrote and presented brief, easy-to-understand slides and talking points to those who needed them most urgently: the medical faculty, who would be the first to resume teaching after the shooting.

Then, with the help of Rheingold of the NMVC and Nick Monk, PhD, executive director of Brown’s Harriet W. Sheridan Center for Teaching and Learning, they adapted the materials to create a universal five-slide deck for department chairs and directors, staff, Winter Session instructors, alumni who planned to host social events over the break, and large-classroom instructors in the departments of engineering and physics. One slide described a range of possible reactions (among them fear, guilt, anger, betrayal) and stressed, “There is no ‘right’ way to respond.” Another recommended healthy coping skills, such as getting sleep and exercise and engaging with others. A third explained that recovery is a process the whole community embarks on together, and a fourth featured a QR code linking to a list of community and mental health resources. The deck was accompanied by guidelines explaining the purpose of each slide, along with possible talking points that presenters could adapt to their style and needs. The goal, Nugent says, was “normalizing, providing information, opportunities for connection, building ‘belonging-ness.’”

Also within days of the incident, Nugent, along with Mary E. Zucker Professor and Chair of Psychiatry and Human Behavior Audrey Tyrka RES’03, MD, PhD, organized an expert panel at the Center of Biomedical Research Excellence for Stress, Trauma, and Resilience (STAR) at The Miriam Hospital. (Established in late 2021 and recently renewed with an $11.1 million federal grant, STAR is co-directed by Tyrka; Nugent is its associate director.) The panel provided free PFA training and consultation to providers from Brown and across Rhode Island. Working with Vice President for Campus Life Patricia Poitevien ’94 MD’98, MSc, they participated in a webinar for parents and families explaining both how to support their students and how their students would be supported by Brown. And Nugent created presentations tailored specifically to faculty and staff of the Department of Engineering, where the violence took place, and organized visits from representatives of the Office for Victims of Crime Training and Technical Assistance Center and the NMVC (both components of the US Department of Justice).

Recovery Tools

The presentations continued in January and February, as an arm of Brown Ever True. Then, in March, Nugent and colleagues rolled out the next phase of Resiliency After, which pivoted from PFA to a series of more in-depth interventions they called Skills for Recovery. The series provided a steady stream of themed, one-hour Zoom sessions, each of which was offered to the Brown community four times, through the end of May.

The sessions provided practical and actionable information on various dimensions of recovery and resilience. Assistant Professor of Psychiatry and Human Behavior Jenny Warnick, PhD, for example, a research scientist at the Weight Control and Diabetes Research Center and a former professional ballerina, spoke about the importance of nutrition and movement. The Medical School’s assistant dean for student well-being, Micheline Anderson F’23, PhD, much of whose research has centered on the intersection of spirituality and health, led sessions on relaxation and mindfulness (see sidebar). Nugent, who has done extensive research on the importance of social connections in fostering resilience, offered strategies for maintaining healthy relationships, including through digital communication. She also presented sessions on the importance of sleep and navigating fear. And Tyrka, a pioneer in understanding the neuroendocrine, epigenetic, and biological aging processes related to early adversity, presented “Finding Joy and Meaning,” sessions that offered reflective practices, like identifying “micro-joys,” that can reignite feelings of hope, community, and possibility.

“Healing means slowly teaching your body and mind that it’s safe and OK to feel good again,” Tyrka says. She believes living through trauma can lead to positive psychological development: “When you go through [trauma], you sometimes find that you learn things about yourself and about being human that you wouldn’t otherwise know. This can include vulnerabilities, as well as sources of strength, healing, and new ways to find joy.”

Outside experts were brought in, too. In March, the NMVC’s Rheingold delivered the annual Mind Brain Research Day keynote lecture, on the science of resilience; she also gave a more intimate talk on navigating grief over loved ones who have been lost to violence, which is her research focus. Megan L. Ranney RES’08 F’10 MPH’10, MD, former professor of emergency medicine at the Medical School and now dean of the Yale School of Public Health, gave a lecture framing gun violence as a public health issue. And Kristina Froling, a survivor of the 2007 shooting at Virginia Tech, spoke with students about her experience.

“Sometimes we see communities struggle and it takes months for them to get a handle on recovery efforts,” Rheingold says. “There’s a core understanding of trauma and resilience at Brown that has been really helpful in guiding and moving its response forward.”

The New Normal

In April, Paxson charged a committee, on which Nugent serves, with developing formal recommendations for a permanent campus memorial honoring the shooting victims, and work has begun on the transformation of the affected Barus and Holley classrooms. The University launched the Office of Student Recovery and Care in August to support students who have self-identified as being the most directly affected by the events of Dec. 13. It is part of the broader Ever True Roadmap to Recovery, which continues to serve the community.

The return of students for the fall semester—those who share the collective memory of Dec. 13, as well as first-years and transfers who don’t—presented new challenges to navigate. For Vanessa Britto RES’89 F’91 ScM’96, MD, who until July was Brown’s associate vice president for campus life and executive director of student health and wellness, that meant wondering not only what returning students will need, but also what new students would be looking for.

“This is an opportunity for us to be truly intentional about continuing to build a community in recovery,” Britto says. An assistant professor of medicine, she also points to an upside of experiencing trauma: “When you have an adverse experience, it can open you up to a new kind of compassion. We need to embrace the adversity we’ve experienced because it will deepen our compassion and help us build a stronger, more resilient community.” Nugent agrees. Resilience, she says, means “moving forward each day with honesty and the knowledge of what we’ve been through.”

The architects of Brown Ever True are quick to underscore another positive, in the support shown by the people of Providence, by colleagues in other impacted universities, and by the entire Brown community.

“In our country, mass shootings are regrettably very common in the news, but they can feel distant and disconnected,” Beaudoin says. “Boy, that does not feel the case when it’s close to home. It was really wonderful to see how people showed up for each other—our community, our students, our staff, even total and complete strangers. That is what is great about being part of Brown.”

Sarah C. Baldwin is the former editor of Brown Medicine and a freelance writer in Rhode Island.