Pamela Ling
University of California-San Francisco, CA·Public Health & Epidemiology
Tobacco is the leading preventable cause of cancer, responsible for about one third of cancer deaths, and 50-60% of cancer overall is considered preventable. That makes behavior, policy and the social conditions shaping tobacco use central to cancer control.
- Fields
Public Health & Epidemiology
Medicine & Clinical Research
Social Science
- Topics
e-cigarettes
vaping cessation
adolescent health
- Grants
- 2 known grants, through May 2028
What they work on
- Adapt the Quit the Hit Toolkit for delivery by youth-serving organizations, assessing their needs and capacity and creating facilitator training materials plus guides for promoting and adopting the program.
- Evaluate the effectiveness of the Quit the Hit Toolkit, an Instagram direct-message group vaping cessation program for people aged 13-21, in a parallel-arm randomized controlled trial run with community partner organizations.
- Document implementation of the toolkit using the RE-AIM framework, measuring treatment fidelity, local adaptations, organizational capacity, barriers and facilitators, and the technical assistance needed for sustainability.
- Identify structural, social, policy, industrial and environmental influences on tobacco use, physical activity, cancer screening and care across the cancer continuum in diverse populations within the cancer center's catchment area.
- Develop and evaluate behavioral, clinical and policy interventions that reduce cancer burden and improve equity in cancer outcomes, translating findings into programs and policy.
More about the research
Both grants pursue the same broad goal from different scales: one builds and tests a concrete intervention to help teenagers quit vaping, and the other coordinates a cancer center program that studies the structural and social drivers of cancer and turns findings into interventions and policy.
Why it matters
Helping adolescents stop vaping matters for cancer prevention because teens who vape are nearly four times more likely to go on to smoke cigarettes. A toolkit version of the Instagram-based program could let school districts and community organizations run an evaluated cessation program at scale, and lessons about reaching adolescents on social media could improve other cancer communication efforts. The cancer control program's broader work targets the social and structural conditions behind tobacco use, screening and care, with the aim of reducing cancer burden and narrowing gaps in outcomes.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Neal Doran
University of California-San Diego, CA·Public Health & Epidemiology
Identify modifiable social, contextual and individual risk factors that predict e-cigarette initiation and progression in children, using repeated assessments from the ABCD cohort of youth ages 9 to 19.
Seth Noar
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, NC·Public Health & Epidemiology
Synthesize experimental studies of alcohol warnings in a meta-analysis to estimate their effects on intentions to reduce drinking and related outcomes such as knowledge and risk beliefs.
Beth Glenn
University of California-Los Angeles, CA·Public Health & Epidemiology
Identify risk and protective factors for cancer and test strategies to reduce cancer risk in the population, drawing on epidemiology, genomics and epigenetics, with a focus on Los Angeles County.
The school
University of California-San Francisco: 89 labs on PI Pages, $2.1B a year on research, 164 research doctorates a year.
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