Violence is a widespread public health and justice system problem with far-reaching consequences for victims, offenders, and their communities. Aggression, the cognitive and behavioral antecedent to violent action, is mainly understood in terms of the psychosocial risk factors that increase the likelihood of aggressive behavioral strategies. Neighborhood context is a principal risk factor for violent crime perpetration, but the mechanisms that mediate the effect of the environment on individual-level aggression behavior are poorly understood, especially the biological factors that may contribute to our understanding of violent behavior. In order to gain a better understanding of mechanisms that precipitate violence in specific geographic contexts, this dissertation explores the relationship between aggression behavior and the gut microbiome, a spatially determined physiological system that affects human health and behavior. In humans, post mortem microbiome studies show a loss of biodiversity in high crime census block groups that can be leveraged, alongside indicators of socioeconomic status, to predict block group crime level, supplying critical foundational support to explore how differences in gut microbiome composition relate to human aggression behavior. The overall goal of this research is to connect basic science findings in mice to correlational evidence of a relationship between the human gut microbiome and violent crime exposures, thus revealing how community health affects individuals and supplying a potential target for future intervention.
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