story by Claire Miller
Assistant Professor Marisa Franco received a two-year, $339,384 diversity research supplement from the National Institutes of Health’s (NIH) Fogarty International Center to participate in a research project on a smoking cessation intervention in China and Vietnam.
The project, entitled, “Cultural Adaptation and Evaluation of mHealth Interventions for Smoking Cessation in China and Vietnam,” will study interventions for smoking cessation that use mobile technology to address the unique sociocultural barriers to quitting smoking for Chinese and Vietnamese smokers.
NIH diversity research supplements are designed to recruit and support faculty members from groups that are underrepresented in health-related research. This supplement will allow faculty in Georgia State University’s School of Public Health – the ones leading the smoking cessation grant project – to provide Franco with mentoring and training in tobacco research, international research partnerships, mobile health, community-based research, cultural adaptation, research design and data collection and analysis, among other areas.
Franco’s current research interests include racial discrimination and health disparities, and her participation in this project will help her develop a secondary research interest in tobacco use for underrepresented and at-risk populations.
“Imagine how hard it would be to quit smoking if every time you met up with your friends, they brought you cigarettes and expected you to smoke with them. This is the case for many men in China and Vietnam,” she said. “My role in this grant will be to examine how relationships between social/relational predictors and cigarette smoking affect our intervention’s success.”