Tobacco Research Team

Dr. Gary A. Giovino joined the faculty of the Department of Health Behavior in the SUNY at Buffalo School of Public Health and Health Professions in September 2006. His research interests focus on patterns, determinants, consequences, and control of tobacco use; which are part of a more general focus on disease prevention and health promotion. Dr. Giovino earned his doctoral degree in Experimental Pathology (Epidemiology) at the University at Buffalo in 1987. In 1988, he joined the Office on Smoking and Health at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), where he served as Chief of the Epidemiology Branch during most of the 1990s. In 1999 he became a Senior Research Scientist in the Department of Health Behavior of the Roswell Park Cancer Institute. Dr. Giovino is a member of the New York State Tobacco Control Program Advisory Board. He is Principal Investigator of two Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF)-funded studies; the first is a survey on national patterns of youth smoking cessation and the second is a national survey of US adult smokers to assess “hardcore” smoking and interest in tobacco harm reduction. He also heads the tobacco team for the ImpacTeen component of the RWJF-funded Bridging the Gap project. In addition, Giovino conducts tobacco surveillance and evaluation work with funding from the National Cancer Institute and the National Science Foundation. Dr. Giovino has authored or co-authored more than 170 scientific publications on tobacco, including his work on several reports of the Surgeon General, dozens of articles in the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, and an Institute of Medicine report on tobacco harm reduction.

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Dr. Cummings is a senior cancer research scientist and director of the Tobacco Control Program at the Roswell Park Cancer Institute in Buffalo, New York. He also holds the position of Professor in the Department of Social and Preventive Medicine at the State University of New York at Buffalo where he teaches graduate courses in cancer epidemiology and health behavior. Dr. Cummings received his master’s and doctoral degrees from the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. He is nationally recognized as an authority on smoking issues and has contributed to several Surgeon General’s Reports on Smoking and Health and an Institute of Medicine Report on nicotine addiction in children. He is a member of the New York State Commission on Smoking or Health and serves as a consultant to the California Health Department’s tax funded antitobacco campaign. Dr. Cummings is a senior editor for the journal Tobacco Control and is author of over 120 published scientific papers; most of which are on the topic of tobacco control. His current research interests focus on public policy approaches to tobacco control.

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Jamie F. Chriqui, Ph.D., M.H.S. is the Director of Policy Surveillance and Evaluation for the Health Policy Center within the Institute for Health Research and Policy and a Research Associate Professor in Political Science at the University of Illinois at Chicago. She has nearly 20 years’ experience conducting public health policy research, evaluation, and analysis, with an emphasis on obesity, substance abuse, tobacco control, and other chronic disease-related policy issues. Dr. Chriqui has led a number of efforts to develop quantitative measures of the extensiveness of state and local level public health policies. Her research interests focus on examining the impact of law and policy on practices, community environments and individual behaviors/attitudes. For the Bridging the Gap and ImpacTeen projects, she directs all state, local and school district obesity policy research as well as leading the state tobacco control policy research activities. As part of this work, she directs the Bridging the Gap annual nationwide evaluation of school district wellness policies as well as the ongoing annual surveillance of state taxes on sugar and artificially sweetened beverages, snacks, and restaurant sales. Previously, she led the state illicit drug law and substance abuse treatment policy research efforts for the project. Prior to joining UIC, Dr. Chriqui served as Technical Vice-President of the Center for Health Policy and Legislative Analysis at The MayaTech Corporation and, previously, as a policy analyst at the National Institute on Drug Abuse. She holds a BA in Political Science from Barnard College, Columbia University; an MHS in Health Policy from the Johns Hopkins University School of Hygiene and Public Health; and a PhD in Policy Sciences (Health Policy concentration) from the University of Maryland, Baltimore County.

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Dr. Hyland is a researcher at the Roswell Park Cancer Institute. He received a master’s degree in statistics and a doctoral degree in epidemiology from the State University of New York at Buffalo. His research focuses on the evaluation of tobacco policies and tobacco surveillance, and he has published on a variety of tobacco control topics.

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Dr. Tworek received a Ph.D. in Epidemiology and Community Health from the Department of Social and Preventive Medicine at the State University of New York at Buffalo. Currently, Dr. Tworek is an Associate Research Scientist in the Center for Public Health Improvement and Innovation at the Pacific Institute for Research and Evaluation (PIRE), in Calverton, Maryland and is working with health behavior and health prevention systems and including models for substance abuse prevention related to alcohol, tobacco and illicit drugs. Past and present research has included a focus on health policy related to tobacco and behavioral health. She has conducted tobacco control and policy research, and has extensive experience in survey design, needs assessment, focus groups, and evaluation. She has been the ImpacTeen Tobacco Component Project Manager, and much of her work has focused on youth tobacco use, including youth smoking cessation and the relationship between health policy and adolescent smoking behavior. Research interests include: tobacco control, health behavior, health policy, public health, epidemiology, adolescent health, health services research, community intervention, evaluation, and substance abuse prevention.

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