Jessica Liu is passionate about prevention education for risk behaviors among youth and young adults. This summer she interned with the Stanford Tobacco Prevention Toolkit, developing prevention curriculums to address e-cigarette and marijuana use by adolescents. “I was struck by industry’s overly strategic multimedia marketing campaigns targeted toward youth,” she said. Her paper with Dr. Bonnie Halpern-Felsher, “The Juul Curriculum Is Not the Jewel of Tobacco Prevention Education,” just released by the Journal of Adolescent Health, evaluates JUUL’s (a leading e-cigarette manufacturer) prevention curriculum written about its own products.
A second-year student in the Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences, Jessica points out that as technology changes, interventions need to change. The smoking and drug education of the 70s do not necessarily still work in the era of viral social media and new delivery systems, such as e-cigarettes that deliver a pack of traditional cigarette’s nicotine with just one pod or highly-dosed edible marijuana products. One also needs to account for not only the technology youth are using, but the timing of interventions and uniqueness of each community group or network.
In addition to her continuing thesis work with the group at Stanford’s School of Medicine, Jessica is a research assistant here at the Yale School of Public Health with the Advancing Relationships and Community Health project which looks at cell phones and how social networks impact risk of HIV. She also works for the Yale College Dean’s Office of Gender and Campus Culture on the Alcohol and Other Drugs Harm Reduction Initiative at Yale College.