Noon Lecture: The Critical Role of Scientific Evidence In Promoting Health Governance in the Fight Against the Global Tobacco Epidemic

About the lecture:

This lecture will describe the role that scientific evidence has in the establishment of governance and in its maintenance, and will also present findings from the International Tobacco Control Policy Evaluation Project, the first international research project to evaluate the effectiveness of FCTC policies, including examples of how ITC findings have contributed to the formation and implementation of strong, evidence-based tobacco control policies throughout the world. The lecture will also provide a summary of ITC findings about the impact of tobacco control policies such warning labels and smoke-free laws, including similarities and differences of policy impact between high-income and low- and middle-income countries.

About the speaker:

Dr. Geoffrey T. Fong is Professor, Department of Psychology, University of Waterloo, and Senior Investigator, Ontario Institute for Cancer Research. Dr. Fong is Founder and Chief Principal Investigator of the International Tobacco Control Policy Evaluation Project (the ITC Project), a collaboration of over 80 researchers across 20 countries, inhabited by over 70% of the world’s tobacco users. The ITC Project is conducting population-level research in each country to evaluate the effectiveness of tobacco control policies of the WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC), the first-ever health treaty. He received his AB from Stanford and his PhD in psychology from Michigan and has held faculty positions at Northwestern and Princeton. He is an editor of the forthcoming U.S. National Cancer Institute and WHO Monograph on the economics of tobacco control and has been a consultant for WHO, Health Canada, and a number of countries. Dr. Fong received the University of Waterloo’s Distinguished Teaching Award in 1999, and in 2007, he was the first researcher selected as a Senior Investigator of the Ontario Institute for Cancer Research. In 2009, Dr. Fong and two Waterloo colleagues received a “Top Canadian Achievement in Health Research Award” from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research and the Canadian Medical Association Journal on behalf of the ITC Project.