Adam Alexander, PhD
Dr. Adam Alexander is a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center, TSET Health Promotion Research Center in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. Dr. Alexander holds a doctoral degree in Social and Behavioral Sciences from the University of Memphis School of Public Health and a master's degree in General Psychology, also from the University of Memphis. Dr. Alexander’s research addresses tobacco use and physical and mental health among Black Americans. His research also examines the effect of traumatic events on tobacco use and physical and mental health. Overall, Dr. Alexander seeks to understand the behavioral, cultural, socioeconomic, and biological determinants of physical and mental health, with an emphasis on examining and explaining health disparities.
Dr. Alexander’s current research investigates whether colorism affects smoking behavior and cessation. Colorism, which is prejudice based on skin color, is an understudied area of discrimination, and Dr. Alexander is exploring whether darker skin color is associated with smoking and poor cessation outcomes. Dr. Alexander is also investigating whether childhood adversity affects smoking behavior and cessation. Dr. Alexander thinks that colorism and childhood adversity contributes to persisting tobacco-related health disparities.
Raees Shaikh, PhD
Raees Shaikh started on March 14, 2016. He is a registered medical practitioner in India and has worked as a physician before coming to the US for his graduate education. He earned his MPH degree from Missouri State University and PhD in health promotion and disease prevention research from the University of Nebraska Medical Center. His PhD dissertation focused on the issue of hardcore smokers in the United States and his primary areas of research interest include tobacco control, tobacco harm reduction and epidemiology of nicotine addiction and treatment. His current research focuses on modified risk tobacco products, especially electronic cigarettes.
Emily Hébert, DrPH
Emily Hébert started on August 1, 2016. She earned her DrPH in Health Promotion and Behavioral Sciences from the University of Texas School of Public Health. Her dissertation focused on the use of ecological momentary assessment to measure real-time tobacco marketing exposure among young adults. Her current research interests include the use of technology for health promotion, tobacco prevention and cessation, ecological momentary assessment, and the role of social media in tobacco marketing and health communication.
Elise Stevens, PhD
Elise Stevens started on August 22, 2016. She earned her PhD in mass communication with a focus on the psychological effects of health messages from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her work examines how emotional reactions to messages about health can have a subsequent effect on adopting or maintaining healthier behaviors. Her current research focuses on the cognitive and affective processes of nicotine addiction and how they may inform message design. Dr. Stevens is a post-doctoral research fellow at the Harvard Chan School of Public Health and Dana-Farber Cancer Institute at Harvard University to study the cognitive and emotional responses to tobacco-related messages to help inform effective message design and tobacco policy.
David Frank, PhD
David Frank started on January 9, 2017. He earned his PhD in Neuroscience at the University of Georgia focusing on the stability, timing, and connectivity of affective neural networks in the human brain. David is interested in the brain mechanisms that underlie emotional stimulus processing and how this affects attention and reward. Through the use of noninvasive measures including rapid sampling functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), dense-array electroencephalography (EEG), and peripheral psychophysiological recording, he investigates the functions of cortical and subcortical networks that have evolved to facilitate appetitive and defensive behavior.
Bárbara Piñeiro, PhD
Bárbara Piñeiro started on May 1, 2017, and her faculty mentor is Jennifer Irvin Vidrine, PhD. She earned her PhD in Clinical Psychology from the University of Santiago de Compostela (Spain). Her dissertation focused on the study of factors related to smoking cessation and relapse in smokers who received a cognitive behavioral treatment for smoking cessation. She was an International Postdoctoral Fellow at the Tobacco Research & Intervention Program (TRIP) at Moffitt Cancer Center. At TRIP she gained experience in dual use of tobacco cigarettes and e-cigarettes, as well as e-cigarette use and smoking among cancer patients; tobacco-related health disparities; and interventions for smoking cessation for Spanish-speaking smokers. Her current research interests focus on tobacco use/cessation with an emphasis on tobacco-related health disparities.
Alayna P. Tackett, PhD
Dr. Alayna P. Tackett earned her PhD from Oklahoma State University in 2017 and completed her clinical residency at the Alpert Medical School of Brown University. She completed her a postdoctoral research fellowship through a Ruth L. Kirschstein National Research Service Award (NRSA) Individual Postdoctoral Fellowship (National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI); Award # F32HL138734) at Brown University and the TSET Health Promotion Research Center. Dr. Tackett’s postdoctoral research examined the respiratory and inflammation effects of electronic cigarette use in youth with asthma under the mentorship of Theodore Wagener, PhD, Elizabeth McQuaid, PhD, Deborah Pearlman, PhD, and Kate Guthrie, PhD. During this time, Dr. Tackett was awarded a Loan Repayment Grant Award from the NIH/NHLBI and a tobacco regulatory science K01 career development award (K01 HL148907) which will examine the longitudinal respiratory effects of e-cigarettes among youth and young adults using human laboratory methodology and ecological momentary assessment. Dr. Tackett is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Pediatrics at the University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center (OUHSC)
Dr. Anh Ngo, PhD
Dr. Ngo earned her PhD in Economics from the University of Illinois at Chicago in August 2018. Her research interests focus on tobacco control policies and alcohol taxes. Applying innovative research designs, Dr. Ngo and her colleagues examined the impacts of tobacco control policies (i.e. point of sale advertising bans, graphic warning labels, MPOWER) on smoking prevalence and cigarette consumption in a global context. Her research has been published in leading public health journals such as Addiction, Preventive Medicine, and International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health.
Currently, Dr. Ngo is extending her research to e-cigarettes and alcohol taxes. Specifically, using online discrete choice experiments, she and her colleagues are examining the impacts of flavors, device types, and health warning messages on the choice of e-cigarettes among US young adults. In the other projects, using time-series data of alcoholic beverage prices and taxes from Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries, she and her co-authors estimate the excise tax pass through rates to prices of alcohol products to provide evidence on factors associated with alcohol tax avoidance and evasion in both US and international contexts.