Dr. Amanda Fallin-Bennett Receives MERIT Award from National Cancer Institute
Amanda Fallin-Bennett, PhD, RN, assistant professor, has received a MERIT award (R37) from the National Cancer Institute in recognition of her R01 grant submission entitled "Adoption of Smoke-free Laws and Voluntary Policies in Rural Communities in Southern States."
Smoking remains high in America’s rural southern population, and the gap in smoking prevalence between rural and urban residents is growing.
The initial three years of this award will focus on shifting the current research paradigm to a new way of understanding smoke-free law adoption in rural, southern municipalities. The overarching goal is to reduce tobacco use disparities in rural, southern municipalities and promote social justice by fostering smoke-free laws and improving health outcomes.
The MERIT Award will allow Dr. Fallin-Bennett to extend this project by an additional 2 years (total of 5 years of support at a budget of $2,002,724) through administrative review.
Dr. Amanda Fallin-Bennett is an active early-career tobacco control scientist with a focus on tobacco use and disparate populations. As a faculty associate in the Tobacco Policy Research Program, she is currently a Building Interdisciplinary Research Careers in Women's Health (BIRCWH) scholar, and is developing a program of research focused on tobacco use and tobacco-related policies in mental health and substance abuse treatment facilities. In June 2014, she completed a three-year postdoctoral fellowship with Dr. Stanton Glantz at the University of California San Francisco’s Center for Tobacco Control Research and Education. She has led projects related to tobacco use, policy and prevention for vulnerable populations: in tobacco growing states; and among lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender adults, college students, and bar-going young adults. Fallin-Bennett has also led two multi-site capacity-building projects funded by California’s Tobacco Related Disease Research Program to evaluate smoke and tobacco-free college campus policies in California as an extension of her dissertation research. Dr. Fallin-Bennett will be teaching in the undergraduate research course and serving as co-coordinator for the undergraduate research internship program.
