Faculty

Jonathan Romo

Center of The Union in Latin America supporting the work of organizations throughout the region. He is responsible for communication issues, coalition-building, and support and technical assistance to grantees, and other civil society organizations particularly in Brazil and Mexico. He also collaborates in the development of trainings and capacity building activities of The Union Latin America.

Barbara McGaw is the Project Manager for the Caribbean Bloomberg Initiative project entitled “Introducing a Picture-Based Health Warning System on Cigarette Packages in the Caribbean”. The objective of the project is to achieve a strong (CARICOM) cigarette labelling standard, and to ensure implementation of same in four target countries.  She has held this position since April 2008

Jorge Alday

jalday@worldlungfoundation.org

World Lung Foundation; Manager, Public Relations
Resources for Mass Media In Tobacco Control
Current works as part of the Bloomberg Initiative to Reduce Tobacco Use, involves providing technical assistance to governments and NGOs so they can develop measurable, high-impact mass media campaigns. Research suggests such campaigns can prompt people to make quit attempts and campaigns that build support for tobacco control policies.

David Hammond

Dr. Hammond's research examines the effectiveness of population-level health interventions. Much of my work is focuses upon developing evidence-based guidelines for the World Health Organization’s Framework Convention on Tobacco Control—the world’s first international public health treaty. As a consequence, my research has an international scope and involves collaborations with experts from a range of disciplines in over 10 different countries, including those in low and middle income countries. Ultimately, I hope to conduct research that not only evaluates the impact of existing initiatives, but provides the evidence and impetus for more effective health policy.

Howard K. Koh

Dr. Howard K. Koh is the Harvey V. Fineberg Professor of the Practice of Public Health, Associate Dean for Public Health Practice, and Director of the Division of Public Health Practice at the Harvard School of Public Health. He also serves as Director of the Harvard School of Public Health Center for Public Health Preparedness. Dr. Koh received his M.D. from Yale University and M.P.H. from Boston University School of Public Health. From 1997 through 2003, Dr. Koh served as Commissioner of Public Health for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, appointed by Governor William Weld. An accomplished physician, advocate, scholar, and healer, Dr. Koh has been recognized for his interdisciplinary leadership in public health. He has published more than 200 articles in the medical literature and is nationally known in the areas of cancer prevention, tobacco control, Asian-American health issues, and skin oncology (melanoma and cutaneous lymphoma). In addition, he has served as Principal Investigator on numerous medical research grants funded by the National Cancer Institute and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and was elected to membership in the Institute of Medicine of the National Academies. Dr. Koh has received the Drs. Jack E. White/LaSalle D. Leffall, Jr., Cancer Prevention Award from the American Association for Cancer Research and the Intercultural Cancer Council, as well as the national Distinguished Service Award from the American Cancer Society. In 2000, President Bill Clinton appointed Dr. Koh to a term on the National Cancer Advisory Board.

Richard J. O'Connor

Dr. Richard J. O'Connor is Assistant Member of the Department of Health Behavior, Division of Cancer Prevention and Population Sciences in 2007. He earned a bachelor's degree in Psychology (1999) from the George Washington University (Washington, D.C.) and a doctorate (2004) in Biobehavioral Health at the Pennsylvania State University (University Park, PA).
Dr. O'Connor has authored over 40 scientific papers on topics related to tobacco control He is the Director of Tobacco Research Laboratory and co-investigator on the Roswell Park NCI-supported transdisciplinary tobacco use research center (TTURC) which is investigating the impact of national level tobacco control policies across different countries. The tobacco laboratory serves to characterize popular products sold on the international market in terms of physical and design features, so as to provide greater insight into user-product interactions that may affect addiction and/or health outcomes.
Dr. O'Connor also coordinates the International Tobacco Product Repository, which is creating cohort surveillance of popular tobacco products in a number of countries. His research spans mechanisms of tobacco addiction including patterns of tobacco use, development of unobtrusive and minimally invasive measures of tobacco exposure in humans, and ways to communicate with consumers about tobacco products.

Maizurah Omar

Maizurah Omar, Ph.D is the Principal Investigator of the Malaysian Arm of the International Tobacco Control Policy Evaluation Research (ITC) Southeast Asia Project, funded by the National Cancer Institute, NIH, as part of the Roswell Park TTURC. She is a faculty member of the Research Network for Tobacco Control, a key member of the Clearinghouse for Tobacco Control-SEA, both funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, and a member of the Malaysian Council for Tobacco Control. She is a Fellow for Southeast Asia for Tobacco Control (SEATCA), a resource person for research in labeling and packaging for the ASEAN region and a member of the International Visual Literacy Organization. Her publications mainly focus on research and production of warning labels and visual images not only in tobacco control but also in other areas namely toxicology and pharmacy. She has created both ICT and Multimedia Educational Packages and e-learning Packages for the World Health Organization (WHO), the International Use and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC), the Ministry of Education and the Ministry of Health in Malaysia.

Maizurah Omar
Clearinghouse for Tobacco Control, National Poison Centre, Universiti Sains Malaysia, 11800 Minden, Penang, Malaysia

Tel: 604-6570099
Fax:604- 6568417
Mobile: 0196556357

Jonathan M. Samet

Jonathan M. Samet, M.D., M.S., is Professor and Chairman of the Department of Epidemiology of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.  Dr. Samet received a Bachelor’s degree in Chemistry and Physics from Harvard College, an M.D. degree from the University of Rochester School of Medicine and Dentistry, and a Master of Science degree in epidemiology from the Harvard School of Public Health.  He is trained as a clinician in the specialty of internal medicine and in the subspecialty of pulmonary diseases.  From 1978 through 1994, he was a member of the Department of Medicine at the University of New Mexico.  At the Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health, he is Director of the Institute for Global Tobacco Control -- which is a WHO Collaborating Center and one of the major partners in the $125 million Bloomberg Global Initiative to Reduce Tobacco Use -- and Co-Director of the Risk Sciences and Public Policy Institute.  His research has addressed the effects of inhaled pollutants in the general environment and in the workplace.  He has written widely on the health effects of active and passive smoking and served as Consulting Editor and Senior Editor for Reports of the Surgeon General on Smoking and Health and the National Cancer Institute’s Monographs on Tobacco Control.  He testified against the tobacco industry in litigation brought by the State of Minnesota and the U.S. Department of Justice.  He has edited books on the epidemiology of lung cancer and on indoor and outdoor air pollution.  He was elected to the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences in 1997.  He received the Surgeon General’s Medallion in 1990 and 2006 for his work on the Surgeon General’s Reports and the Prince Mahidol Award, from the King of Thailand, in 2005 for his work on air pollution.

Mark Travers

Mark Travers is a Research Affiliate in the Division of Cancer Prevention and Population Sciences at the Roswell Park Cancer Institute. Mark has degrees in biomedical engineering and epidemiology and has spent the last several years providing the scientific basis for clean indoor air policies by researching exposure to tobacco smoke pollution and evaluating the effects of smoke-free air policies. He has conducted the largest study of tobacco smoke pollution exposure in the hospitality industry and his research has been featured in debates over smoke-free air legislation in dozens of communities. He has worked to provide sound scientific evidence to support smoke-free air policies and effectively communicate this evidence to researchers in a wide range of fields, national, state and local policy makers, the media, local advocacy groups and the lay public. His current research is in validating the latest methods in air monitoring and integrating them with measurements of biological markers of exposure to tobacco smoke pollution. Mark and colleagues in the Roswell Park Cancer Institute Transdisciplinary Tobacco Use Research Center (Roswell TTURC) are conducting a global air monitoring effort that is currently in 40 countries around the world measuring exposures to tobacco smoke pollution and informing the debate over smoke-free air policy.

Charles W. Warren

Charles W. Warren, PhD, is a Distinguished Fellow/Statistician with the Office on Smoking and Health, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Atlanta, Georgia.  He currently is working on international youth tobacco prevention and control programs.  In particular, he is working on the Global Tobacco Surveillance System, an international tobacco surveillance system in collaboration with the World Health Organization.  This system includes three survey components: the Global Youth Tobacco Survey (GYTS), the Global School Personnel Survey (GSPS), and the Global Health Professions Student Survey (GHPSS).