People

The Center faculty come from all four UCSF schools and conduct research and teaching in every aspect of tobacco control, from efforts by the tobacco industry to manipulate international politics to the molecular biology of nicotine addiction.

 

Cristin Kearns, DDS, MBA

Asst Prof in Residence
Preventive & Restor Dent Sci

For the last decade, Dr. Kearns has been working to establish food industry documents research as a new area of investigation that transforms the way people think about sugar and the sugar industry’s role in promoting health inequities related to dental caries, obesity, heart disease, and diabetes. In 2018, her research and document collecting efforts culminated in the launch of the UCSF Food Industry Documents Archive (FIDA), a collection of more than 600,000 sugar-industry related documents, which is part of the UCSF Industry Documents Library (IDL).

Salomeh Keyhani, MD

Professor
Medicine

Dr. Keyhani is a primary care provider and UCSF investigator based in the San Francisco VA Health Care System. She is interested in improving health care delivery and also has an interest in clinical outcomes research. She is currently leading multiple VA and NIH funded cohort studies examining the health effects of cannabis.

Minji Kim, PhD

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M_Cardiovascular Research Inst

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.

Shannon Kozlovich, PhD

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M_Cardiovascular Research Inst

Shannon Kozlovich, PhD, has a doctorate in Pharmaceutical Sciences from Washington State University where her research focused on the impact of genotype and menthol on tobacco toxicity and carcinogenic effects. The work with menthol opened her eyes to the impact scientific evidence has on public policy, or rather, the impact it should have.

Lisa Kroon, PharmD

Department Chair and Professor
Clinical Pharmacy

Dr. Lisa Kroon is a Professor and Chair of the Department of Clinical Pharmacy in the School of Pharmacy at the University of California in San Francisco. Dr. Kroon received her Doctor of Pharmacy at the University of Michigan and then completed two years of residency at UCSF in pharmacy practice and hospital pharmacy administration. She has been a member of the UCSF faculty since 1996. In 2020, she was appointed the Assistant Chief Pharmacy Officer for Research, Education, and Clinical Services in the UCSF Health Pharmacy Enterprise.

Susan Lee, MD

ASST ADJ PROF-FY
M_Anesthesia

Dr. Susan M.Lee recently completed a trial investigating a smoking cessation program implemented preoperatively, through which she gained an understanding of the challenges of implementing a multidisciplinary program and techniques to overcome these challenges.  She has since successfully established strong ties with community agencies, such as the Smokers' Helpline, and collaborated with other researchers, culminating in a peer-reviewed publication and implementation of the program clinically.

Heather Leutwyler, RN, PhD, NP

Associate Professor
Physiological Nursing

Dr. Leutwyler has extensive research and clinical experiences working with adults with serious mental illness, and her research focuses on identifying factors associated with poor physical health among adults with schizophrenia and conducting interventions to promote physical health among adults with serious mental illness. Currently, Dr.

James Lightwood, PhD

Associate Professor
Clinical Pharmacy

Research program involves estimating the changes in direct healthcare costs due to changes in smoking behavior in large populations, and changes in exposure to passive smoking and health care cost and utilization attributable to adoption of smoke-free laws. Dr. Lightwood has done research in cost-benefit and cost-effectiveness analysis of disease prevention and management programs, cost savings attributable to smoking cessation, and the economics of infectious disease control

Pamela Ling, MD

Professor
Medicine

Dr. Ling studies tobacco industry marketing strategies targeting young adults, women, and other high risk population, and new smokeless and novel tobacco product marketing strategies.  She also studies how to use tobacco industry marketing strategies to improve tobacco control programs.

Karla Llanes, PhD

Postdoctoral Scholar
M_Cardiovascular Research Inst

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.

Joanne Lyu, PhD

Postdoctoral Scholar
Medicine

Joanne Lyu, PhD, received her PhD in Communication from The Chinese University of Hong Kong. Prior to joining CTCRE, she was an Assistant Professor at Macau University of Science and Technology, and most recently at The Hang Seng University of Hong Kong. During her doctoral study, Joanne won a Top Student Paper award in the Public Relations (PR) Division at the 2012 annual conference of International Communication Association (ICA). In 2017, as a principal investigator, she was awarded a Hong Kong government research grant. Joanne is excited to be a member of CTCRE.

Ruth Malone, RN, PhD, FAAN

Professor
Social Behavioral Sciences

Research focuses on tobacco industry activities aimed at undermining public health, strategic positioning and messaging, marginalized populations, and emerging developments in the social construction of tobacco use. Dr. Malone is known nationally and internationally for her research on the tobacco industry’s strategic efforts to counter public health. Her work is funded by the National Cancer Institute, NIH, and by the California Tobacco-Related Disease Research Program. She has served as a consultant on tobacco industry activities for the U.S.

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