Investigator Biographies
University of Pennsylvania
- Caryn Lerman, Ph.D. (Director)
- Julie Blendy, Ph.D. (Co-Director)
- Steven Siegel, M.D., Ph.D. (Co-Director)
- David Asch, M.D., M.B.A.
- Janet Audrain-McGovern, Ph.D.
- Don Baldwin , Ph.D.
- Joseph Cappella, Ph.D.
- Myles Faith, Ph.D.
- Thomas Gould, Ph.D.
- Daniel Heitjan , Ph.D.
- Christopher Jepson, Ph.D.
- Daniel Rodriguez, Ph.D.
- Margaret Rukstalis, M.D.
- Robert Schnoll, Ph.D.
- Andrew Strasser, Ph.D.
- Janet Weiner , M.P.H .
- E. Paul Wileyto, Ph.D.
Harvard Medical School, Massachusetts General Hospital
University of Pittsburgh
Battelle Centers for Public Health Research and Evaluation
Caryn Lerman, Ph.D. (Director)
Dr. Lerman is a Mary W. Calkins Professor in the Department of Psychiatry and the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the Deputy Director of the Abramson Cancer Center at the University of Pennsylvania. Her research interests include behavioral pharmacology investigations of novel therapeutics for nicotine dependence and pharmacogenetic investigations of nicotine dependence treatment. She is the Principal Investigator of the TTURC and Co-PI of the Center for Excellence in Cancer Communication Research.
Dr. Lerman is a former member of the National Cancer Institute (NCI) Board of Scientific Advisors and the National Human Genome Research Institute Advisory Panel on the Ethical, Legal, and Social Implications (ELSI) Program. She has been the recipient of the Society of Behavioral Medicine New Investigator Award, the American Psychological Association Award for Outstanding Contributions to Health Psychology, and the American Society of Preventative Oncology Cullen Award for Tobacco Research. She is a member of numberous organizations, including the American Psychological Association, Society for Research in Nicotine and Tobacco, and the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology.
Julie Blendy, Ph.D. (Co-Director)
Dr. Blendy is Associate Professor of Pharmacology at the University of Pennsylvania and a member of both the Graduate Group in Pharmacological Sciences and the Neuroscience Graduate Group.
Her research investigates molecular mechanisms underlying the biochemical and behavioral changes associated with drug addiction. Dr. Blendy is Co-director of the TTURC and the Principal Investigator of a project in the center examining the involvement of the cAMP response element binding protein (CREB) and the endogenous opioid system in the reinforcing and aversive properties of nicotine.
Dr. Blendy completed her doctoral degree in pharmacology at Georgetown University and postdoctoral training at Johns Hopkins University and the German Cancer Research Center.
Steven Siegel, M.D. (Co-Director)
Dr. Steven Siegel is Assistant Professor of Psychiatry in the Division of Neuropsychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania.
His research interests include the development of long-term delivery systems to increase compliance with Psychiatric and other medications and the use of animal models of sensory information processing deficits in schizophrenia. Dr. Siegel is the Principal Investigator for the Stanley Center for Experimental Therapeutics in Psychiatry where the focus of his research is to create new methods to increase compliance with antipsychotic medications through long-term delivery systems. This program is also supported by the National Institute of Mental Health. In addition, his laboratory studies the role of NMDA and nicotine receptor signaling in electrophysiological abnormalites related to schizophrenia and or ncotine dependence. Dr. Siegel is also attending physician at the Hospital for the University of Pennsylvania.
Dr. Siegel is a member of numerous scientific organizations including the Society for Neuroscience, the American Psychiatric Association, the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill, the Society for Biological Psychiatry, The Society for Research on Nicotine and Tobacco and the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology.
David Asch is Executive Director of the Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics at the University of Pennsylvania, where he is the Robert D. Eilers Professor of Medicine and Health Care Management and Economics at the School of Medicine and the Wharton School. He is also Director of the Robert Wood Johnson Health & Society Scholars Program at the University of Pennsylvania and the VA Center for Health Equity Research and Promotion at the Philadelphia VA Medical Center.
Dr. Asch's research aims to understand how physicians and patients behave and make medical choices in clinical, financial, and ethically charged settings. He has special expertise in understanding how physicians and patients incorporate perceptions of financial cost and health risk into their decisions, including the adoption of new pharmaceuticals or medical technologies or the purchase of health or life insurance. His research combines elements of economic analysis with moral and psychological theory and marketing. Dr. Asch can be emailed here.
Dr. Audrain-McGovern is Assistant Professor of Psychology in the Department of Psychiatry and a member of the Cancer Center at the University of Pennsylvania.
Her research interests center around understanding what influences cancer risk behaviors and developing interventions to modify these behaviors. Dr. Audrain-McGovern is the Principal Investigator for the TTURC project evaluating genetic, psychological, and social predictors in the adoption of smoking among teens and she is a Co-Principal Investigator on the TTURC project to evaluate the genetic predictors of response to nicotine replacement therapy for smoking cessation. In addition, Dr. Audrain-McGovern is the Principal Investigator on a federally funded grant to evaluate the impact of a behavioral economic based intervention for smoking among college students. She is also the Principal Investigator on a federally funded grant to evaluate psychological adjustment and physical activity in women with an elevated risk for breast cancer.
Dr. Audrain-McGovern has more than 10 years of research experience in smoking cessation and nicotine dependence. She is the recipient of a National Cancer Institute (NCI) Preventive Oncology Academic Award. In addition to this work, she is a member of the Editorial Board and an Ad-Hoc Reviewer for several journals. She has also served on the Scientific Review Committee for the California Tobacco-Related Disease Program and the Cancer Research Foundation of America.
Dr. Baldwin is Director of the Penn Microarray Facility and the Molecular Diagnosis and Genotyping Facility. An Adjunct Associate Professor of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine, he provides microarray and other genomics lab services to clients within and outside the University of Pennsylvania. His research interests include transcription regulation, chromatin remodeling, host-pathogen interactions, and genomics technology development. Dr. Baldwin directs the TTURC Genetics Core. Dr. Baldwin can be emailed here.
Joseph N. Cappella, Ph.D., is Professor of Communication and holds the Gerald R. Miller Chair at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. He has been a visiting professor at the University of Pennsylvania and Northwestern University and a visiting scholar at Stanford.
Dr. Cappella’s research has focused on political communication, health, social interaction, media effects, and statistical methods.
His research has been supported by grants from the National Institutes of Mental Health, the National Institute on Drug Abuse, the National Science Foundation, the Twentieth Century Fund, and from the following foundations: Markle, Ford, Carnegie, Pew, and Robert Wood Johnson.
Dr. Cappella has served on the editorial boards of 15 different journals including Communication Monographs, Social Psychology Quarterly, Critical Studies in Mass Communication, Quarterly Journal of Speech, Journal of Personal and Social Relationships, Journal of Communication, Communication Research, and Communication Theory. In addition, Dr. Cappella is a Fellow and former President of the International Communication Association, and recipient of the B. Aubrey Fisher Mentorship Award. Dr. Cappella can be emailed here.Dr. Faith is Assistant Professor of Psychology in Psychiatry at the Weight and Eating Disorders Program, University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine.
Dr. Faith received his doctoral degree in clinical/school psychology from Hofstra University in 1995. He then completed a 3-year post-doctoral fellowship at the NIH-funded New York Obesity Research Center (NYORC) at St. Luke's-Roosevelt Hospital, Columbia University, where he trained in behavioral-genetic methods for studying human eating and obesity. Dr. Faith subsequently joined the faculty of the NYORC where he used twin designs to address the genetic and environmental bases of childhood eating behavior and collaborated in behavioral interventions for childhood obesity.
Dr. Faith joined the faculty of the University of Pennsylvania in October 2002 and continues to study the development of child eating patterns and the treatment/prevention of childhood obesity. His research projects test interventions to prevent excess weight gain among young children at risk for adulthood obesity, methods to measure appetite and satiety in children, and genetic bases of eating behaviors and body composition in children. Dr. Faith is collaborating with TTURC researchers on behavioral economic experiments of food reward among smokers who are abstinent from smoking, and potential underlying mechanisms.
Dr. Gould is Associate Professor of Psychology at Temple University and member of the Temple University Neuroscience Program. Dr. Gould received his BS in Psychology from the University of Wisconsin and his Ph.D. in Psychology and in Neuroscience from Indiana University. His current research interest is in the effects of nicotine addiction on neurobiology of learning and memory.
In addition, he is currently collaborating with investigators at the Tobacco Use Research Center to develop animal models of the effects of nicotine addiction and withdrawal from nicotine on cognitive processes. Hislaboratory employs behavioral, pharmacological, genetic, and electrophysiological techniques to investigate the neural substrates of learning. Dr. Gould is a member of the Society for Research on Nicotine & Tobacco, the Society for Neuroscience, the Research Society on Alcoholism, and the Pavlovian Society. He is the author of over 40 scholarly manuscripts.
Daniel Heitjan is Professor of Biostatistics and Statistics at the University of Pennsylvania, where he also directs the Biostatistics Core Facility in the Abramson Cancer Center. Dr. Heitjan's research interests include the theory and methodology of statistical analysis with incomplete data; clinical trial design; Bayesian statistics; health economics; and, most recently, statistical methods for smoking cessation studies. Dr. Heitjan is the Director of the TTURC Biomedical Informatics Core and Director of Biostatistics for the TTURC. Dr. Heitjan can be emailed here.
Christopher Jepson is a Biostatistician at the TTURC. Dr. Jepson has a background in social cognition and 22 years of research experience in health behavior, with a focus on cancer prevention. He has served as Principal Investigator on a project examining determinants of repeat adherence to mammography, and as Co-Investigator on a project studying racial differences in breast cancer screening knowledge and behavior among urban public school teachers. As a member of the TTURC, Dr. Jepson has collaborated on numerous pharmacotherapy trials and human laboratory investigations.
Dr. Daniel Rodriguez is Assistant Professor in Psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania and 
an investigator with the TTURC research team. Dr. Rodriguez’s research interests are in the area of health psychology, with specific foci on addictive behaviors, physical activity, and obesity prevention in adolescents and young adults. Dr. Rodriguez has studied factors that relate to adolescent smoking, depressive symptoms, general physical activity, and team sport participation, and has a keen interest in research methodology as it relates to prospective data analysis.
Currently, Dr. Rodriguez is a co-investigator on a federally funded grant to evaluate the effects of type and intensity of physical activity on smoking in adolescents. He is also exploring the mediating role of psychosocial factors like depressive symptoms and perceived physical appearance and health on smoking, and whether these relationships differ by gender and race.
Dr. Rodriguez recently completed his doctoral degree in Human Development at the University of Maryland in College Park. Before joining the TTURC, Dr. Rodriguez served as Assistant Professor of Psychology at Widener University in Chester, PA. Dr. Rodriguez can be emailed here.Dr. Margaret Rukstalis is Adjunct Asssistant Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania and on the staff of the Geisinger Health Center.
Her clinical practice and research interest focus on exploring sex differences in brain-behavior-drug interactions. Dr. Rukstalis is the Principal Investigator of the TTURC investigatioini of Atomoxetine effects on nicotine withdrawal symptoms.
Dr. Rukstalis graduated from Dartmouth Medical School and received residency training at Harvard Medical School and the University of Chicago. She also completed fellowships in clinical pharmacology at the University of Chicago and addiction psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania. Dr. Rukstalis is board certified in psychiatry and addiction psychiatry.
Dr. Schnoll is Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania and a member of the Abramson Cancer Center at the University of Pennsylvania.
Dr. Schnoll directs a collaborative research program designed to evaluate treatments for tobacco dependence. In particular, Dr. Schnoll’s research focuses on the study of new treatments for tobacco dependence, the examination of novel ways to use existing treatments for tobacco dependence to improve their efficacy, and the study of issues relevant to smoking cessation clinical trials. Current studies involve the evaluation of depressive symptoms as a moderator for response to bupropion among cancer patients who smoke; the evaluation of smoker characteristics as moderators of response to nicotine replacement therapies; the examination of psychological and genetic factors related to continued tobacco use among cancer patients; and the examination of novel medications for smoking cessation.
After receiving his Ph.D. in experimental psychology from the University of Rhode Island in 1998, Dr. Schnoll completed a post-doctoral fellowship in Cancer Prevention and Control at Fox Chase Cancer Center and remained at Fox Chase Cancer Center as a faculty member in the Division of Population Science until September 2005, when he moved to the University of Pennsylvania. Currently, Dr. Schnoll serves as an Associate Editor for Annals of Behavioral Medicine and as a member of the NCI Small Grants for Behavioral Research and Cancer Control review committee. Dr. Schnoll can be emailed here.
Dr. Andrew Strasser is Assistant Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania.
Dr. Strasser’s research interests include behavioral variations and individual differences in cigarette smoking. His focus is on investigating the effect smoking behavior and topography have on biomarkers of exposure. His current research includes examining how smokers use potential reduced exposure products and if compensatory smoking of these products relates to increases in carcinogen exposure. Additionally, Dr. Strasser collaborates with the University of Pennsylvania Center for Excellence in Cancer Communication Research, investigating the effect of media and advertising on beliefs about harm reduction, as well as psychological and physiological responses to anti-smoking public service announcements.
Dr. Strasser completed his doctoral degree in August 2002 in Biobehavioral Health at Penn State University followed by a training fellowship at the UPenn TTURC.
Ms. Weiner codirects TTURC's Research to Practice Core. She is Associate Director for Health Policy at the Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics at Penn. In that capacity, she helps investigators develop targeted communication and dissemination strategies for their research. She also edits LDI's monthly "Issue Brief" series, which analyzes the policy implications of clinical and health services research for public and private decision makers.
Dr. Wileyto is Assistant Professor of Biostatistics in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania's Health Systems, and the Biostatistician for the Penn Transdisciplinary Tobacco Use Research Center. His primary responsibilities include collaborative analysis of data, experimental design, grant writing, and development and testing of outcome measures for smoking cessation research. He has a secondary responsibility for education and training of staff in statistical methods, use of statistical software, and data management issues related to analysis. Dr. Wileyto is also engaged in ongoing collaborative statistical work with the Radiation Oncology Department, helping to analyze the spatial relationship of tumor hypoxia with blood supply from images.
Dr. Wileyto's research interests lie in applications of mathematical statistics in biology and medicine. Before joining the TTURC, he worked in the Section of Epidemiology and Public Health for the University of Pennsylvania's School of Veterinary Medicine at the New Bolton Center on population dynamics and epidemiology of Lyme disease. During this time, he conducted the largest case-control study ever done on Lyme disease. Dr. Wileyto also conducted innovative methodological work in the statistical estimation of population size from trap data at the USDA Stored Product Insects Laboratory.
Dr. Wileyto received his Ph.D. in Ecology from the University of Pennsylvania (Department of Biology), and completed a post-doctoral fellowship in Mathematical Epidemiology at Johns Hopkins University's School of Hygiene. He has a secondary appointment in the University of Pennsylvania Medical School's Department of Biostatistics, and is an Associate Scholar in the Center for Clinical Epidemiology and Biostatistics.
Visit Dr. Wileyto’s personal homepage to pick up publications or STATA and Matlab software: http://mail.med.upenn.edu/~epw/
Alexandra E. Shields, Ph.D. is Director of the newly formed Harvard/MGH Center on Genomics, Vulnerable Populations and Health Disparities. She also holds faculty appointments in Medicine (Health Policy) at the Harvard Medical School. Dr. Shields received her Ph.D. in Social Policy from the Heller School, Brandeis University, where she was a Pew Health Policy Scholar and an AHCPR Fellow. While at Brandeis, she also served as staff researcher for the Council on the Economic Impact of Health System Change. Prior to her doctoral work, Dr. Shields held several senior positions in state government, including Director of Ambulatory Care at the Massachusetts Rate Setting Commission (now the Division for Health Care Finance and Policy). She also holds a B.A., summa cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa, in Sociology and Theology, and a Master’s degree, with distinction, in Theology from Boston College, where she was the Bernard J. Lonergan Scholar in Theology.
Dr. Shields has more than 15 years experience working on issues related to access to health care for low-income and uninsured individuals, in both government and academic settings. Dr. Shields’ principal research interests include issues related to the quality of care provided to underserved populations, health disparities, and challenges associated with clinical integration of new genetic technologies. Dr. Shields has been a PI on studies assessing provider performance and racial disparities in the quality of asthma care provided to Medicaid-enrolled children. Dr. Shields is currently PI on a 5-year grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation to study clinical and ethical issues related to tailoring smoking cessation treatment by genotype. More recently, Dr. Shields was awarded a NIH-funded ELSI P20 grant to develop a Center of Excellence in ELSI Research on “Genetics, Vulnerable Populations and Health Disparities,” which examines the complex intersection of emerging genetic research and the persistent problem of health disparities through in-depth analysis of three key clinical areas: tobacco dependence, asthma, and diabetes. She is also PI of a new NHGRI R01 project investigating attitudes and beliefs of Black and white Americans regarding the role of genetics in addiction and smokers’ willingness to undergo genetic testing in order to be match to optimal treatment. Dr. Shields is founder of the Consortium on Complex Chronic Illness, Quality and Equity. In this capacity she leads several studies addressing health outcomes for highly prevalent chronic conditions among privately insured, Medicaid, TRICARE, and VA populations.
Dr. Kenneth Perkins is Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine in Pittsburgh, PA. He also has secondary appointments in Psychology and Epidemiology.
He is PI on one of the current TTURC projects, a study aimed at identifying the optimum procedures for brief screening of the potential efficacy of novel medications for smoking cessation. Previously, he directed a TTURC-supported pilot study comparing acute responses to nicotine medication via nasal spray versus patch as a function of dopamine genotype.
Dr. Perkins has served on several NIH and other federal and state grant review committees. Presently, he is a past-President of the Society for Research on Nicotine and Tobacco (SRNT), as well as a Fellow of the American Psychological Association and of the Society of Behavioral Medicine.
Dr. Perkins has published more than 150 scientific papers-- mostly on the acute subjective, behavioral and psychological effects of nicotine or smoking in humans that may explain why tobacco use is addictive. He has also served on the editorial boards of the Journal of Consulting & Clinical Psychology and Health Psychology, and currently is Assistant Editor of the journal Addiction and serves on the boards of Psychopharmacology, and Experimental and Clinical Psychopharmacology.
Dr. Perkins received his Bachelor's degree in Psychology from the Oberlin College and earned his Master's and Doctoral degrees in Clinical Psychology from the University of Iowa. Dr. Perkins can be emailed here and you can read more about him on his web site @
http://myprofile.cos.com/perkinsk31
Dr. Wallace Pickworth works for Battelle Centers for Public Health Research and Evaluation in Baltimore, MD as a Health Science Leader. He is a former employee of the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) in the Clinical Pharmacology and Therapeutic Research Branch Treatment Section as a Staff Scientist. He holds degrees in both pharmacology and pharmacy.
Dr. Pickworth's main research focus has been the study of mechanisms of action of dependence producing drugs. He joined the PENN TTURC to conduct research on DNA adducts/harm reduction in smokers in conjunction with Drs. Caryn Lerman and Peter Shields. He is also involved in studies examining the genetics of tobacco withdrawal (TTURC).
Dr. Pickworth is a member of The Society for Research on Nicotine and Tobacco (SRNT), The College on Problems of Drug Dependence (CPDD), and Society for Neuroscience. He also serves as Adjunct Faculty at Albany College of Pharmacy, the College of Notre Dame of Maryland, and the University of Maryland, College of Pharmacy. Dr Pickworth is a regular advisor to the World Health Organization. He has published over 70 articles in peer-reviewed journals. Dr. Pickworth can be emailed here.