Jill Messing

Jill Theresa Messing, MSW, PhD is a Professor in the School of Social Work and the Director of the Office of Gender-Based Violence at Arizona State University. Dr. Messing specializes in the development and testing of intimate partner violence risk assessments, and is particularly interested in the use of risk assessment in collaborative, innovative interventions and as a strategy for reducing intimate partner homicide. She is a Principal Investigator on the P.A.I.R. Studies, a 6-state series of case-control studies examining risk factors for intimate partner homicide funded by the National Institutes of Health, the National Collaborative on Gun Violence Research, the National Science Foundation, and Everytown for Gun Safety. She is also the Principal Investigator on research funded by Arnold Ventures that focuses on enhancing safety for intimate partner violence survivors when their partners are involved with the criminal-legal system. Dr. Messing’s intervention-focused research on the integration of the social service and criminal-legal system responses to intimate partner violence has been funded by the National Institutes of Justice and the Office on Violence Against Women. To enhance survivor access to risk assessment and intervention, Dr. Messing and her colleagues developed the technology-based myPlan intervention (www.myplanapp.org). She was a co-investigator on three NIH-funded randomized controlled trials examining the effectiveness of this safety planning tool for women in abusive relationships and is currently adapting the intervention for Kyrgyzstan through a grant from the Sexual Violence Research Initiative and the World Bank. Dr. Messing has been invited by the U.S. State Department to speak about intimate partner violence to Embassies and practitioners in Central Asia, West Africa, and Southeastern Europe. Dr. Messing is a co-lead within the Grand Challenges for Social Work and has worked to Mainstream Gender throughout the Grand Challenges. As co-editor of the 2nd edition of the book, Grand Challenges for Social Work and Society, she curated Gender Mainstreaming inserts within each chapter to bring an intersectional feminist lens to all of the Grand Challenges for Social Work.