Rate My Professor Paul Boxer

Paul Boxer is a Professor of Psychology at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey-Newark. He earned his Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology from Bowling Green State University. Boxer's research program centers on the development and management of aggressive behavior, especially in very high-risk environments such as psychiatric inpatients, gang members, and youth exposed to persistent ethnic-political or neighborhood violence. Approaching these issues from developmental-ecological and developmental psychopathology frameworks, he examines configurations of risk exposure tied to aggression, the applicability of normal developmental models to high-risk populations, and strategies to ameliorate aggressive behavior problems. His interests include violent and non-violent antisocial behavior, evidence-based interventions for conduct problems and delinquency, juvenile justice practices and policies, socialization and social development, and the influence of violence in communities, the media, families, and peer groups on individual behavior and mental health.

Affiliated faculty in the Rutgers School of Criminal Justice and School of Social Work, Boxer contributes to the Center on Youth Violence and Juvenile Justice. In 2020, he received a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention grant as a lead investigator to study links between violence exposure and weapons use among youth. Key publications include "Long-term effects of parents' education on children's educational and occupational success: Mediation by family interactions, child aggression, and teenage aspirations" (2009); "Continuity of aggression from childhood to early adulthood as a predictor of life outcomes: Implications for the adolescent-limited and life-course-persistent models" (2009); "Exposure to violence across the social ecosystem and the development of aggression: A test of ecological theory in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict" (2013); "Aggression in very high-risk youth: Examining developmental risk in an inpatient psychiatric population" (2007); "Negative peer involvement in Multisystemic Therapy for the treatment of youth problem behavior" (2011); "Gang involvement moderates the effectiveness of evidence-based intervention for justice-involved youth" (2015); and "Effectiveness of Multisystemic Therapy for gang-involved youth offenders: One year follow-up analysis of recidivism outcomes" (2017). Boxer's work informs prevention efforts and juvenile justice policies.