Dr. Ellen Hahn Receives $919,465 in Grant Funding for Tobacco Treatment and Community Empowerment Research
Ellen Hahn PhD, RN, FAAN, professor, has received two grant awards; the first from the state of Kentucky entitled “University Partnership – Enhancing Tobacco Dependence Treatment” and the second from the National Institute for Environmental Health Sciences supplement program entitled "Empowering Concerned Communities with Validated Approaches to Environmental Citizen Science.”
Dr. Hahn’s "Tobacco Dependence Treatment" award will focus on conducting a study on enhancing tobacco dependence treatment in Medicaid populations in Kentucky and developing a multi-pronged approach to reach Kentucky Medicaid providers who have current training in tobacco dependence with the goal of characterizing gaps in treatment approaches, infrastructure and brainstorming potential solutions. This will be accomplished by expanding UK BREATHE’s novel online tobacco treatment specialist training to target Medicaid providers and disparate populations.
Her second award, "Environmental Citizen Science," will focus on empowering community residents to address their environmental concerns through use of two new validated citizen science toolkits. Within this supplement, Ellen and her team along with collaborators at the University of Cincinnati and within the community will develop, optimize, and evaluate the usability and feasibility of citizen science toolkits for soil and radon sampling for community-engaged environmental health research and community outreach, and expand their easily accessible online cross-site platform for collective data sharing.
Ellen J. Hahn is an Alumni Professor in the Colleges of Nursing and Public Health at UK and Director of BREATHE including the Tobacco Policy Research Program, the Kentucky Center for Smoke-free Policy (KCSP), and the Radon Policy Research Program. She holds the Marcia A. Dake Endowed Professorship in the College of Nursing. Dr. Hahn is Associate Director for the Center for Health Services Research, Faculty Associate at UK’s NCI-designated Markey Cancer Center, and facilitator for the Lung Cancer Translational Research Group.
Dr. Hahn received her undergraduate degree in nursing from Frances Payne Bolton School of Nursing, Case Western Reserve University. She earned a Master of Arts in Health Education from The Ohio State University and a Master of Science in community health nursing from Indiana University. In 1992, she completed a PhD in health policy/health of the community with a minor in substance abuse and the family at Indiana University School of Nursing.
Through KCSP, Dr. Hahn and her colleagues have assisted many of Kentucky’s 42 communities to go smoke-free. Hahn and colleagues have published multiple smoke-free workplace policy outcome studies showing positive health effects and no harm to business. In 2011, Dr. Hahn was inducted into the American Academy of Nursing. Dr. Hahn was named the 2012 UK Provost’s Public Scholar, and is Ambassador for Friends of the National Institute of Nursing Research.
