Arthur (Arturo) Durazo is a health psychologist with an emphasis on behavioral medicine, eHealth/mHealth interventions, and health equity. His research focuses on psychosocial factors that promote protective behaviors among those with disproportionate burdens of illness associated with membership in low socioeconomic and ethnic minority groups.
Daniel G. Orenstein, JD, MPH, received a law degree from Arizona State University (2011), an MPH in Health Policy from Harvard (2016), and a BA in Political Science and Sociology from the University of Arizona (2005). Following law school, Dan served as Deputy Director of the Network for Public Health Law in the Western Region, providing technical assistance on a wide variety of public health legal issues.
Shannon Lea Watkins is a scholar of public affairs whose work aims to illuminate social and structural barriers that individuals face in achieving their full health potential to inform efforts to promote health equity. Her current work investigates patterns of tobacco initiation, product change, and cessation among youth and young adults, with a particular focus on the role of additive flavors in tobacco initiation, use, and tobacco-related health disparities.
Priyanka Vyas, PhD started her career as a journalist in New Delhi, after completing her BA in political science from Wilson College, Mumbai. During her stint as a reporter covering trade and policy issues, she became interested in how policies could be better analyzed and implemented. This single most desire to influence policy decisions led her to move to the US for further education.
Manali Vora, DDS earned her DDS in Dental Surgery from Gujarat University, India in 2014, recently received her MPH in Epidemiology at University of Washington, Seattle. She was sensitized to the tobacco epidemic during her training as a dentist and has since then been passionate about tobacco dependence prevention and treatment research.
Yvette did a PhD in public health ethics at the Centre for Biomedical Ethics, National University of Singapore and a BSc in Biochemistry (Pharmacology) at the University of Surrey, UK. As part of her studies, she was also based at the University of Turku (Finland), Hastings Center (New York), University of Tübingen (Germany), Brocher Foundation (Switzerland), and WHO Regional Office for Europe (Denmark). After her PhD she worked as a Public Health Analyst at Newcastle City Council, UK, and as a freelance consultant for the WHO Regional Office for Europe's tobacco control programme.
I am a health geographer interested in qualitative and mixed methods approaches to understanding relationships between people’s everyday environments and behaviors related to health and wellbeing. During my fellowship at the Center for Tobacco Control Research and Education at UCSF, I am researching place-embedded social practices of smoking within marginalized groups, such as young LGBTQI adults, in order to better understand the persistence of smoking within these groups and inform the design and effectiveness of tobacco control efforts.
