Dr. James Thrasher is an anthropologist, behavioral scientist and communications expert in the Department of Health Promotion, Education, and Behavior at the University of South Carolina’s Arnold School of Public Health. For more than a decade, he has also been a Researcher and Visiting Professor at the Mexican National Institute of Public Health (www.insp.mx). His research aims to determine how policy and media interventions can address domestic and global public health challenges, especially the global epidemics of tobacco use and obesity.
He is the Primary Investigator (PI) for the Mexico arm of the International Tobacco Control Policy Evaluation Project, which involves collecting data from cohorts of smokers in 23 countries around the world. He is also the PI for cross-country comparative research on tobacco warning labels and serves on marketing and entertainment media influences on youth smoking. He is the Co-Chair of the Global Health Network for the Society for Research on Nicotine and Tobacco and was the chair of the Scientific Committee for the 4th Latin American conference on Tobacco or Health, held in Costa Rica in March 2014.
His course on Public Health Policy and Advocacy addresses key global public health issues, and he has mentored graduate students from around the world (Southeast Asia, South Asia, Latin America, Middle East, Europe), including doctoral and postdoctoral students with Fulbright scholarships.