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.
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.
Minji Kim's research interest focuses on message effects and persuasion. She is particularly interested in the effect and boundary conditions of tailored communication. Kim received a Ph.D. in Communication from the Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania, with a dissertation examining the positive and negative role of character-audience similarity in anti-smoking campaigns using various themes.
Yogi Hale Hendlin earned his PhD in Environmental Philosophy at the University of Kiel, Germany, after completing doctoral work at UCLA, a Master's at the London School of Economics, and degrees at UC Berkeley. Hendlin's interests are at the intersection of public health policy, social and environmental justice, business ethics, and the philosophy of science.
Dharma Bhatta, PhD received his doctorate in Epidemiology from the Prince of Songkla University, Thailand in 2016. He is an epidemiologist and public health expert/researcher, with over ten years of experiences in academia and public health research in developing countries. Dr.
