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.
I study the health effects of air pollution in human subjects. I focus on the chemistry and toxicity of smoke and on how exposure to tobacco or cannabis smoke can cause heart and lung disease. My analysis of tobacco industry research showed that sidestream cigarette smoke (the primary constituent of secondhand cigarette smoke) is more toxic than the smoke that smokers inhale and that secondhand smoke becomes more toxic as it ages.
Laura A. Schmidt, PhD, is a Professor of Health Policy in the School of Medicine at the University of California at San Francisco. She holds a joint appointment in the Philip R. Lee Institute for Health Policy Studies and the Department of Anthropology, History and Social Medicine. Dr. Schmidt is also Co-Director of the Community Engagement and Health Policy Program for UCSF’s Clinical and Translational Sciences Institute.
Dr. Schroeder is Distinguished Professor of Health and Health Care, Division of General Internal Medicine, Department of Medicine, UCSF, where he also heads the Smoking Cessation Leadership Center. The Center, funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Truth Initiative, works with leaders of more than 80 American health professional organizations and health care institutions to increase the cessation rate for smokers.
Dr. Schumacher is Professor and Chief of the Division of Pain Medicine in the Department of Anesthesia and Perioperative Care, University of California, San Francisco. He has a clinical, research and educational focus on pain medicine with an emphasis on the development of evidence – based pain care into general clinical practice that utilize non-addictive modalities to improve both the quality and safety of analgesic care. Dr.
Research has centered on hospital-based and out-patient clinical trials of smoking cessation. Completed studies include: Transdermal Nicotine Therapy for Hospitalized Smokers and Bupropion for Hospital-Based Smoking Cessation. Dr.
Neil Sircar, JD, LLM is a human rights lawyer specializing in global and public health, global governance, and health in humanitarian crises. He recently concluded a Fogarty Global Health Fellowship with the National Institutes for Health through the Northern Pacific Global Health Consortium at the University of Washington. He is principal investigator on a study for assessing the implementation of human rights-based approaches to HIV testing and notification in Kenya with the prominent Kenyan non-governmental organization Kenya Legal and Ethical Issues Network.
Dr. Smith's work focuses on tobacco control policy, particularly approaches to the tobacco endgame. Past projects include work on the tobacco industry's influence on and relationships with the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender communities, tobacco industry interest in diet and obesity issues, tobacco product waste and pollution, and tobacco control policy issues in the U.S. military.
Joanne Spetz is Director and Brenda and Jeffrey L. Kang Presidential Chair in Health Care Financing at the Philip R. Lee Institute for Health Policy Studies (IHPS), University of California San Francisco. IHPS is a 50-year-old research unit that conducts innovative research to support, guide, and enable policymakers, communities, and clinicians in making evidence-informed decisions that improve health and health care for individuals and families.
The focus of my research program in the Division of Clinical Pharmacology, as shown in the image below, is the utility and evaluation of biological markers (biomarkers) of tobacco use and exposure for epidemiology, risk assessment, product regulation, and identification of susceptibility factors.
Dr. Sung is Professor of Health Economics at the Institute for Health & Aging at UCSF. Her tobacco-related research areas focus on 1) estimating the healthcare costs of cigarette smoking, other tobacco use, and secondhand smoke exposure; 2) economic evaluation of tobacco taxation, other tobacco control policies, and smoking cessation intervention programs; 3) economic impact of smoking on vulnerable populations such as African Americans, Hispanics, low-income people, and persons with mental illness; and 4) global health economics of tobacco use. Dr.
At the same time that regulations on tobacco and on opioid prescriptions have become more stringent, regulations on cannabis have become less stringent: as of 2019, 11 states had legalized recreational cannabis and an additional 22 states had lega