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Nathan Cobb, MD, is a Research Investigator at the Schroeder Institute for Tobacco Research and Policy Studies at Legacy®, a practicing physician, and expert in the field of behavioral informatics. His prior work as a smoking cessation counselor and computer programmer for health risk assessments were a springboard for the development of QuitNet, one of the first Internet based behavior change interventions. Dr. Cobb’s current work leverages social networks to effect behavior change through social support and social influence. This includes both retrospective exploration of a 10 year database of interactions of participants in the QuitNet network, as well as novel interventions using social utilities such as Facebook and alternative delivery mechanisms such as text messaging.
Dr. Cobb holds adjunct faculty appointments with Georgetown University School of Medicine and the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. His medical practice is currently limited to inpatients, attending in the Georgetown Intensive Care Units and seeing Pulmonary consult patients on the wards. He earned his medical degree from Boston University and completed his medical residency at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. Dr. Cobb also completed Pulmonary & Critical Care Fellowships at the Harvard Combined Program in Boston. From 2004-2005 he served as a Senior Research Fellow at Boston University School of Public Health, and completed a research fellowship at the Tobacco Treatment and Research Center at Massachusetts General Hospital in 2008. He is board certified in Pulmonary Medicine, Critical Care Medicine, and Internal Medicine.
This project seeks to determine the elements of an application for smoking cessation that determine diffusion (viral spread). Based on previous pilot work, we plan to create a smoking cessation application within Facebook where multiple elements can be turned on or off. This allows us to randomize individuals to one of dozens of potential possible applications, and look for effect and interaction effects using a factorial model. The primary outcome of this project is to look at dissemination (as opposed to effectiveness).
Principal Investigator: Nathan K. Cobb, MD
SI/Legacy Collaborators: Amanda Graham, PhD, David Abrams, PhD
External Collaborations: Tom Valente, PhD (UCS), E. Paul Wileyto, PhD (U Penn), Linda Collins, PhD (Penn State)
Funding: National Cancer Institute (1R01CA155369-01A1)
Project period: 8/2011 - 6/30/2014
This project seeks to develop a set of integrated, online tools for smokers to quit and stay quit, assisted by other individuals in their social environment. The system as envisioned will include a series of interlocking components: access to a social network for support and dissemination, text messaging for proactive content, and IVR and mobile applications for access at any time. This project is funded internally and supplemented with external funding.
SI/Legacy Collaborators: Amanda Graham, PhD, David Abrams, PhD, Tom Kirchner, PhD
Funding: Internal
As part of a recently completed trial studying QuitNet, one of the largest and oldest online social networks for smoking cessation, we created a longitudinal database covering the social interactions of participants over nearly 10 years. The database comprises over a half million people and millions of communications. This unique data set allows us to observe changes in social network structure over time both at a macro and an individual level, and associate these changes with an array of behavior processes and smoking outcomes. We are currently using automated coding techniques, including sentiment analysis and automated tagging, to look at the impact of public conversations on decision making about medication use.
SI/Legacy Collaborators: Amanda Graham, PhD
External Collaborations: Darren Mays, PhD (Georgetown University)
Smoking cessation remains the single most effective public health tool to improve the nation’s health and reduce the huge burden of preventable disease on our economy. While tobacco use among white and Latino Washington, DC residents declined between 1996 and 2007, the percentage of African American residents who use tobacco increased from 21.5 percent to 23.9 percent (CDC, 2008). In DC, as is the case nationally, smoking rates are higher in neighborhoods with lower per capita incomes and higher rates of poverty (CDC, 2008). Tobacco cessation telephone counseling lines (“quitlines”) have the potential to reach large numbers of underserved smokers with effective treatments, yet utilization remains low, and we know very little about how best to engage and retain contact with quitters. This project represents a collaborative effort that utilizes web-enabled mobile devices to enhance the effectiveness of an established quitline program benefiting underserved communities in Washington, DC. This translational work is unconventional and innovative in the way it leverages web-based real-world, real-time contact (“ecological momentary assessment” methodology) to literally close the loop between research and practice. Via a partnership between the DC Department of Health Tobacco Quitline and the Schroeder Institute for Tobacco Research and Policy Studies at the American Legacy Foundation, this project is uniquely positioned to deliver and evaluate smoking cessation support services to underserved communities characterized by the highest rates of smoking prevalence, providing both an immediate and potentially lasting benefit to these communities.
Principal Investigator: Thomas R. Kirchner, PhD
SI/Legacy Collaborators: David Abrams, PhD, Amanda Graham, PhD, Nathan Cobb, MD
Collaborators at other institutions: Saul Shiffman, PhD (University of Pittsburgh)
Funding agency: National Institute on Drug Abuse (1RC1 DA028710)
Project Period: 9/2009 – 9/2011
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