Our Fellows

Sheiphali Gandhi, MD, is a pulmonologist specializing in occupational and environmental respiratory disease. She graduated from Indiana University School of Medicine in 2012. She went to the University of Minnesota for her internal medicine residency and global health chief residency during which she received her Certificate in Tropical Medicine through the Center of Disease Control and American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene. She completed her fellowships in Pulmonary and Critical Medicine at Northwestern University and Occupational and Environmental Medicine at the University of California San Francisco. During this time, she specialized in occupational pulmonology namely pneumoconioses with projects in coal mine and silica dust respiratory disease surveillance. 

As a postdoctoral fellow at UCSF, Dr. Gandhi plans to investigate the environmental and occupational risk factors for mesothelioma in the collaboration through a case-control study in collaboration with the California Department of Public Health and the California Cancer Registry. Additionally, she will conduct a feasibility study of the creation of a rapid case ascertainment and patient contact study utilizing natural language processing techniques using electronic pathology records. 

Eileen Han, PhD, received her doctorate in Communication from the Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania. During and after her PhD studies, she mainly conducted qualitative research about social media, with a focus on collective memory and social activism. She published a book about social media and collective memory in China, which was an expansion of her dissertation research. Since then, she has been expanding her research to look at social media in many other contexts, including health and medicine, in which she is primarily interested in the use and understanding of expertise and authority in the digital age. Her current research mainly focuses on the public discourses on social media about health issues, including how Twitter users talk about doctors and the medical community during the COVID-19 pandemic. This year, she has also received a MS degree in Information from the University of Michigan, where she had trainings in programming, data analysis, natural language processing and machine learning. 

Dr. Han is very excited to join the fellowship program at CTCRE, where she would like to combine her qualitative and computational skills to explore promising topics in the tobacco regulatory field. She will focus on how the public discussions on major social media platforms about new tobacco products and personal experiences could inform policymaking and regulation. She is also interested in looking at different types of authorities and expertise in this process. She would also like to study various forms of texts related to tobacco marketing and control. 

Karla Llanes, PhD, received her doctorate in Health Psychology at the University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP). During her PhD training, she worked for A Smoke Free Paso del Norte, a west Texas, southern New Mexico, and Juarez, Mexico regional initiative targeting tobacco control in adolescents and adults. She has also taught several Statistics courses and Motivation and Emotion courses at the University of Texas at El Paso. Her research interests are in judgment and decision-making processes in the context of health-related decisions (e.g., vaccination decisions, driving under the influence of alcohol, marijuana use, and novel tobacco use). Her goal is to identify judgment biases that distort risk communications and risk perceptions and, eventually, impact individuals' decisions to engage in health-threatening and health-promoting behaviors. She currently studies individual’s motivation for initiating and continuing drug use.

   As a postdoctoral fellow, Dr. Llanes plans on continuing her research investigating predictors of drug use, drug use initiation, and cessation. She is particularly interested in investigating risk factors associated with tobacco use, novel tobacco use, and co-use (e.g., e-cigarette and alcohol use). Specifically, she would like to identify why individuals make harmful health decisions. By understanding what leads to harmful real-life decisions, then she can help develop interventions that may help people change for the better.

Mehrdad Mohammadi, MD, MPH, MA in Law and Diplomacy received his credentials in medicine, public health, law and development economics from Tehran University, Tufts University and Harvard University. He has been an adjunct professor at the School of Public Health at Tehran University teaching Justice and Public Health Law. Working with the WHO, Dr. Mohammadi has advised the Ministry of Health on International Health Regulations and the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC). This includes projects on tobacco content and emission regulation (FCTC Articles 9 and 10), tobacco products plain packaging (FCTC Articles 11 and 13), NGO advocacy (FCTC Articles 4.7 and 12.e), smoke-free cities and campuses (Article 8), liability of the tobacco industry (FCTC Article 19), and participation in COP9 in 2021. He has founded the NGO titled An Iran Immune to Tobacco (IMAD).

Andre Luiz Oliveira da Silva, PhD received his doctorate from Escola Nacional de Saúde Pública Sergio Arouca in 2019 with a specialization in public health. Dr. Oliveira da Silva joined the CTCRE in June 2022. As the Tobacco Center's first Briger Fellow, he anticipates spending one year in the Tobacco Control Research Fellowship both gaining from our faculty's expertise and sharing his rich experiences in tobacco control research from his homeland of Brazil. Dr. Oliveira da Silva will be mentored by Stella Bialous, DrPH, FAAN, also from Brazil. Both researchers have worked for a long time with the WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control and tobacco control polices.