Faculty facilitator: Jennifer Cantrell, DrPH
Dr. Cantrell’s lab conducts tobacco and nicotine research with a primary focus on use of cigarettes, cigars and cigarillos, e-cigarettes and emerging products. Projects in the lab include interventions and epidemiological studies. Interventions focus on optimizing clinical treatment and messaging interventions to reduce tobacco use. Epidemiological studies identify evolving product use patterns and examine the impact of media, marketing and policy on perceptions and use. All research in the lab seeks to reduce the most harmful forms of tobacco use among socially and economically disadvantaged groups, strengthen scientific knowledge with innovative methods and provide practical evidence to inform cessation interventions, surveillance, countermarketing campaigns, regulation and policy.
Examples of studies in the lab include MOST QUITS, a National Cancer Institute-funded grant aimed at optimizing novel interventions for quitting cigarette smoking among people living with HIV in clinical care using Multiphase Optimization STrategy (MOST), implementation science and decision analysis. Other research involves analyzing national datasets to examine patterns of tobacco use over time among youth, young adults, adults and marginalized groups. Communications studies focus on examining digital tobacco marketing and countermarketing and the mechanisms that underlie its impact on behavior.
Graduate and undergraduate students are engaged in research activities such as setting up data collection and tracking systems for complex randomized clinical trials, recruiting and interviewing study participants, analyzing national datasets, conducting qualitative data coding and analysis, writing literature reviews and participating in the development of scientific manuscripts and presentations.