INTERESTS
smoking cessation, health promotion, health services research, implementation research

RESEARCH SUMMARY
A. Personal Statement

My work over the last two decades has focused on innovative ways to reach and deliver tobacco use cessation treatment within health care, particularly to populations with low rates of treatment. Initially, consistent with recommendations at that time, I focused on referring all smokers to a multi-disciplinary smoking cessation program. However, I found that approach, despite a higher individual rate of success, had limited impact because of low acceptance of the referral by smokers and poor attendance at the program. As a result, I shifted my studies and policy efforts from a specialty-clinic model (referral to a smoking cessation clinic) to a primary care-based model. I have studied different approaches to increase tobacco use cessation treatment in primary care, such as use of an on-call counselor and simple referral to a telephone care coordination program for smoking. I have also studies use of a similar clinic-based approach in mental health care.

More recently, I have been studying whether a population-based approach is even more successful at helping smokers to quit. We showed that by reaching out and recruiting from the entire population, proactive outreach in primary care led to a higher population-level quit rate in four VA Medical Centers, and we are now studying the same approach for smokers in VA mental health clinics.

I am currently Principal Investigator on seven large grants, with funding from National Institutes of Health, VA Health Services Research and Development Service and others. Based on my interest in and experience with innovative approaches to recruitment of research participants and integrating research into routine clinical care, I was Co-Chair of the Recruitment and Retention Working Group for our Clinical and Translational Science Institute (CTSI) and designed and am now Co-Chair of its Research Recruitment and Retention Unit.

I currently am in Year 5of a K24 mid-career mentoring award from NIDA, and mentoring is a main focus of my career. I will use my experience and expertise from my CTSI recruitment role and my two decades of experience in large scale tobacco use cessation interventions to assist on this proposed training grant.