Featured Grantees

Navigating the complexity of health care and insurance is overwhelming for many cancer patients. Patients have to become their own advocates, while dealing with the health effects and stress of a cancer diagnosis. This can be particularly hard for adolescent and young adult cancer patients, who typically have little experience with insurance complexities prior to diagnosis.”

I have always been interested in how families adapt to and manage serious illness. My goal is to help patients and family members cope better and engage in better self-care.”

My background as a public health scientist has inspired me to conduct research that is aimed for population-level impact by focusing on developing effective cancer prevention communication messaging. Some of the most common risk behaviors that are linked with cancer, like tobacco use, sun exposure, and indoor tanning, tend to develop at an early age but are highly preventable. I study how to promote cancer preventive behaviors by designing communication messages that resonate with young people and motivate healthy choices.”

My research suggests that people are both highly resistant and susceptible to persuasion. Science-informed persuasive strategies hold the key to developing cost-effective, ethical interventions for health behavior change”

The advent of e-cigarettes has marked an epoch in the history of smoking-their impact on public health needs to be studied and studied clear-headedly.”

As a teacher and a student of social sciences (and an English literature major in college), I realized how important things like communication and interpretation are in all areas of human interaction and behavior. Then, when I became a physician, I realized how powerful these tools could be for prevention and treatment of disease.”

After growing up in rural Kentucky, I moved to California and was struck by the stark geographic disparity in tobacco control policies, and became passionate about closing the gap in rural, southern states.”

As a Peace Corps Volunteer many years ago, I served in two vastly different countries: the Solomon Islands and Kazakhstan. By living in these two disparate places I became keenly aware of how place affects health - through culture, environmental conditions, and policies. I have carried these concepts with me into my research career, trying to understand ways that the social and policy environments affect health and health disparities.”

I am passionate about transdisciplinary research to enhance our understanding about how the brain supports or constrains changes in habitual behaviors that contribute to cancer risk.”

Quitting smoking will never be easy, but I hope my work will help to maximize the likelihood that an individual will successfully quit the first time.”

Being an immigrant, early on it seemed apparent to me that the country a person lives in and who they live with have profound impacts on their life. The mission of my career is to study how these contexts impact cancer risk behaviors.”

Practicing mindfulness has made a real difference in my life. Unfortunately, most of the research on mindfulness has not included very diverse populations, and I am committed to making mindfulness training more widely available to people from all walks of life. Using mobile technology could be one way to provide mindfulness training to low-income smokers who are interested in quitting smoking.”

As a behavioral scientist in the field of cancer prevention and control, it is very exciting to have the opportunity to test cessation interventions in a setting with the potential to reach thousands of older adults who have struggled with smoking their entire lives.”

As a college student I remember being moved and inspired by the new, innovative and hard-hitting visuals and messages from the first wave of the national anti-smoking "Truth" campaign - I knew then that public health and tobacco control was something I wanted to focus on and be a part of. ”

I was first motivated to work in biobehavioral research as an undergraduate student when I heard about research that demonstrated a significant impact of our thoughts and behaviors on our physical health and disease risk. I then realized I had an innate curiosity for understanding the basic biological mechanisms that connect the mind and body.”

Based on my personal experience as a patient, I decided to expand my research from radiology to pathology to turn the microscope back on ourselves (the physicians), and to see how we can improve diagnostic accuracy and patient outcomes.”

I dedicated my career to addressing cancer health disparities through a transdisciplinary research program in minority health. The inequality that still exists in cancer outcomes continues to reinforce my dedication.”

We know from the extant literature on relationships and health that marriage is health-protective. But how couples interact on a day-to-day basis and across years is so important.”

The most profound influence on my work was my mentor, Dr Jane Weeks, who taught me that doing research, and working with the smartest, most interesting, most fun people, can be one of the great joys of life.”

I began my career as a family doctor working in neighborhood health centers in underserved communities. The turning point in my career from clinician to clinician researcher occurred on a job interview in an internal medicine department at a teaching hospital caring for a large population of older individuals.”

The explosion of genetic information into the lives of patients and populations requires that we find tools that will translate genomics to better patient experiences in decision-making, treatment, quality of life, and outcomes. To achieve this goal, we must nucleate interdisciplinary teams that include geneticists, population scientists, behavioral scientists, oncologists, and others to develop and implement comprehensive and impactful patient tools.”

I first became interested in how neighborhood green spaces may improve health through my work in New Zealand, where green spaces tend to be high quality and accessible. Now I live in Michigan, where Detroit is recovering from decades of disinvestment in its parks. While improvements have been made, neighborhoods remain where the city's parks renaissance has not reached. This study allows us to test how restoring parks to be vibrant green spaces may contribute to health in underserved communities.”

The most profound influences on my research program have come from clinical encounters and qualitative research, in which patients/participants are often eager to eat healthier and exercise more but describe real barriers to accessing related programs/resources (costs, transportation, etc.) and desire encouragement and accountability.”

I always knew there was something special about my work, but it wasn't until I presented my findings to a neighboring University I realized how strong my pilot data really was.”

Childhood ultraviolet radiation exposure and sunburns are key modifiable risk factors for development of skin cancers, such as melanoma, later in life. However, there are few skin cancer prevention programs targeting adolescents, including in schools, that focus on teen intentional tanning and sun protection behaviors.”