C. Anderson Johnson, Ph.D. has 28 years of experience in scientific and administrative leadership of large-scale domestic and international community-based research projects. Dr. Johnson's numerous peer-reviewed publications in prevention science have focused on community-based approaches to tobacco, alcohol, and drug abuse prevention, most recently across a range of cultural, environmental, and international contexts. His current work focuses on dispositional and contextual characteristics as they work in combination (culture by environment and gene by environment interactions) to affect tobacco and alcohol use trajectories and prevention at different points in the trajectories. more

Susan L. Ames received her Ph.D. in preventive medicine with a focus on health behavior research from the University of Southern California in 2001. She completed her doctoral training with support from an NCI Cancer Control and Epidemiology Research Training Grant. After completing her doctorate, she was an assistant research psychologist at the Center for Research on Substance Abuse in the Department of Psychology, UCLA, and co-investigator on an Implicit Cognition and HIV risk project. Dr. Ames subsequently became faculty at USC where she was most recently an assistant professor with the Transdisciplinary Drug Abuse Prevention Research Center (TPRC) at IPR, Department of Preventive Medicine, Keck School of Medicine. She has been co-investigator on several substance abuse prevention projects funded by the National Institute of Drug Abuse. Her work focuses on the transdisciplinary area of associative memory. This area integrates research from neuroscience, memory, social cognition, animal learning, and decision theory to explain how drug use (and other risk behavior) habits begin and often are perpetuated over time. more

Dr. Leslie Bernstein, was recently named Professor and Director of the Department of Cancer Etiology in the Division of Population Sciences at the City of Hope National Medical Center. She has also taken on the role at the City of Hope as the Dean for Faculty Development. In taking these positions, Dr. Bernstein retired from the University of Southern California (USC), becoming Professor Emerita. more

Dr. Calderón is a physician executive with extensive experience designing, implementing, managing and evaluating medical, public health, pharmaceutical and community development programs at local, national and international level.  Dr. Calderón received a physician and surgeon’s degree from the Universidad de San Carlos de Guatemala (USAC 1981) and a master's degree in public health from the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA 1984).  He received training at the doctoral level in health services management and infectious disease epidemiology (UCLA 1987), and completed a post-doctoral fellowship in preventive medicine and epidemiology research at the University of Southern California (USC 1991). more

After receiving his doctorate in social psychology from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, Larry Gruder joined the faculty of the Department of Psychology at the University of Illinois at Chicago, where he became Professor and Chair. In 1990, he was appointed Executive Director of the Special Research Programs at the University of California, Office of the President (systemwide headquarters). The three Special Research Programs award research grants on breast cancer, HIV/AIDS, and tobacco-related disease to investigators at California research institutions. Together they award approximately $35 million annually for 150 new multi-year grants and monitor approximately 450 active grants in a wide range of disciplines, including public health, public policy, epidemiology, behavioral science, clinical science, and basic biomedical science (e.g., cellular and molecular biology, immunology, pathology, virology. more

Dr. Levine's research interests include the lymphomas and Hodgkins disease, as well as the AIDS related malignancies. Multiple studies have been ongoing for years, related to the pathogenisis of disease, as well as well as the optimal therapy for affected patients. Dr. Levine worked on the development and testing of an AIDS vaccine with Dr. Jonas Salk, and has also been on the forefront of the study of HIV disease in women. more

Paula Healani Palmer, Ph.D., is Adjunct Associate Professor and Director of Global Health Programs –Designate.  Her research and teaching focus on health promotion and research capacity building in California and developing nations, primarily China and South Asian countries. Her current funded research projects include, the CGU-USC Pacific Rim Transdisciplinary Tobacco and Alcohol Use Research Center, which focuses on preventing tobacco use and alcohol abuse among youth in China; the China Seven Cities Study, a longitudinal study of transition in lifestyles and health-related behaviors in the era of globalization in seven of China’s largest urban areas; an investigation of HIV risk and substance use behavior among rural to urban Chinese migrants, and a longitudinal study of recovery among tsunami victims in India and Sri Lanka. more

Dr. Reynolds is an associate professor in the Department of Preventive Medicine and is director of the Ph.D. Program in Health Behavior Research. He has extensive experience in the development, implementation and evaluation of school- and community-based interventions, focusing on nutrition and physical activity. He is strongly interested in the theory underlying successful health communications and in using this theory to develop health promotion and disease prevention programs. more

Darleen Schuster served as Assistant Professor in the Department of Preventive Medicine as well as the Assistant Director for the Master of Public Health program at the University of Southern California (USC). Her research interests include health communication, specifically the evaluation of statewide tobacco control campaigns and the assessment of pro-tobacco marketing activities. She received an M.A. in Communications Management from USC’s Annenberg School for Communication, an M.P.H. in Community Health Education from California State University, Northridge and a PhD in Preventive Medicine (Health Behavior Research) from USC. She is a certified health education specialist (CHES). more

Alan Stacy received his doctorate in social and personality psychology from the University of California, Riverside (1986) and held postdoctoral fellowships at the University of Washington and the University of Southern California. Stacy has applied an associative memory framework grounded in basic research to the prediction of health behavior in a variety of populations. He has been principal investigator of a large NIH research center and a number of NIH-funded projects applying this approach to alcohol and other drug use among high-risk adolescents, adult drug offenders, and college students. He also has applied the approach in projects on the effects of alcohol advertising, HIV risk behavior, and drunk-driving. His most recent research evaluates dual-process models of health behavior, testing the effects of interactions between implicit memory systems and more deliberative (executive) systems. He also collaborates on research investigating the neural basis of links between associative memory and health behavior. He teaches research methods and has published more than 100 peer-reviewed articles and two books. more

Dr. Trinidad's research examines the social, environmental, and individual factors relevant to racial/ethnic disparities in health and health behaviors. His main research project involves the design and implementation of a culturally-tailored parenting intervention to prevent problem behaviors, including smoking, among Filipino adolescents in Southern California. His second area of research on racial/ethnic disparities in smoking, funded by the Tobacco Related Diseases Research Program of the University of California, has resulted in several publications relevant to California’s diverse populations and has identified ethnic disparities in the effect of the California Tobacco Control Program on adult smoking prevalence. A third area of Dr. Trinidad’s research focus is on the role of emotional intelligence (EI) on adolescent health behaviors. Dr. Trinidad received both his Ph.D. and MPH from the University of Southern California. He completed his post-doctoral training in Cancer Prevention and Control at the University of California at San Diego. He is a member of the national Tobacco Research Network on Disparities (TReND) and is a Co-Chair of the Tobacco Related Health Disparities Committee of the Society for Research on Nicotine and Tobacco (SRNT). more

Dr. Unger is a professor at the Claremont Graduate University School of Community and Global Health. Her research focuses on psychosocial and cultural predictors of substance use and other health-related behaviors among adolescents, including acculturation, cultural values, peer influences, family influences, and stressful life events. Dr. Unger is conducting several large-scale studies of adolescents’ health behaviors across cultural contexts. She has a grant from the National Institute on Drug Abuse to study drug use among Hispanic/Latino adolescents in Southern California, as well as a grant from the California Tobacco-Related Disease Research Program (TRDRP) to examine attitudes toward commercial and sacred tobacco among American Indian adolescents in urban and rural areas of California. Dr. Unger is also a co-director of the Pacific Rim Transdisciplinary Tobacco & Alcohol Use Research Center (TTAURC) where she is the principal investigator of one of its projects, an assessment of gene-environment interactions in adolescent tobacco and alcohol use across cultural contexts. more