Daniel E. Trovato

Office: PCA-353A
Phone: 305.348.8449
Email: dtrovato@fiu.edu
Webpage: Google Scholar
CV: Curriculum Vitae

Biography

Dr. Daniel E. Trovato earned his M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from the School of Criminology and Criminal Justice at Northeastern University, Boston. He studies life course criminology with a particular focus on punishment and violence (i.e., their causes, consequences, and spread). Concerning punishment, his research has explored how school suspension diminishes multiple streams of social capital later in life, how suspension spreads through a process of social contagion across adolescent networks to affect interconnected peers, and how school-level implicit bias among teachers predicts individual suspension outcomes. In addition to his work on punishment, Dr. Trovato has published several articles on violence both within and outside school environments, utilizing multiple methodologies such as social network analysis, geo-spatial methods, and developmental finite mixture modeling. His recent work has uncovered heterogeneity in delinquent peer relationships, revealing that connections to popular and deviant brokers within schools uniquely shape the developmental offending pathways of individuals. Meanwhile, his work on violence outside the school environment examines potential years of life lost due to homicide and suicide, revealing vast disparities across groups, some of which exhibit distinct linear or curvilinear patterns over time. Dr. Trovato and colleagues have also revealed how gun violence hotspots are connected within social networks of ballistic evidence, showcasing that hotspots are both spatially and socially linked in ways that could guide prevention efforts. Dr. Trovato has presented his research at numerous conferences and symposia, including the American Society of Criminology, the Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences, the National Research Conference for the Prevention of Firearm-Related Harms, and the Johns Hopkins Humanities Research Symposium. He has published in a variety of scholarly journals including Criminology, the Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency, the Journal of Research on Adolescence, Social Science Research, and the Journal of Criminal Justice.

Select Publications

Trovato, D. (2026). The company you keep: The influence of popular delinquents and deviant brokers on offending trajectories. Criminology.

Piza, E. L., McMillan, C., & Trovato, D. (2026). Geographic Networks of Gun Violence: Exploring Hot Spot Connectivity Through Ballistic Evidence and Social Network Analysis. Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency, 63(4-5), 419-459.

Zimmerman, G. M., Trovato, D., Fridel, E. E. (2025) Does the Amount of Life Lost Due to Homicide Vary across Place? Examining the Relationship between Residential Disadvantage and Potential Years of Life Lost due to Homicide in the United States. Social Sciences & Humanities Open. (Accepted November 8th, 2025). https://authors.elsevier.com/sd/article/S2590-2911(25)00931-3

Trovato, D., & Zimmerman, G. M. (2025). Suspended by association: Does vicarious suspension increase the odds of adolescent school discipline?. Social Science Research, 128, 103175.

Trovato, D., Zimmerman, G. M., & Vu, H. G. H. (2025). Is school discipline decapitalizing America's youth?: Examining the effect of school discipline on family, peer, teacher, and school social capital. Journal of Criminal Justice, 97, 102368.

Trovato, D., & Zimmerman, G. M. (2024). Contextualizing school discipline: Examining the role of general peer and teacher discrimination at the individual‐and school‐level on individual suspension. Journal of Research on Adolescence, 34(3), 897-911.

Zimmerman, G. M., Fridel, E. E., & Trovato, D. (2024). Disproportionate burden of violence: Explaining racial and ethnic disparities in potential years of life lost among homicide victims, suicide decedents, and homicide-suicide perpetrators. PLoS one, 19(2), e0297346.

Zimmerman, G. M., Trovato, D., & Miller-Smith, A. (2023). Discrimination in context: examining neighborhood-level variation in the incidence and adverse effects of perceived racial and ethnic discrimination among Chicago youth. Race and social problems, 15(3), 304-327.