Specializing In:
Quantitative methods Secondary data analysis Longitudinal population-based studies Policy impact analysisAbout Karin Kasza
Biography:
Karin Kasza is an Assistant Professor of Oncology in the Department of Health Behavior at Roswell Park Comprehensive Cancer Center, where she directs the Quantitative Methods Research Program. For more than a decade, she has led the design and implementation of secondary data analyses from large-scale population-based studies to provide scientific evidence to inform tobacco policy decisions for the betterment of public health.
Dr. Kasza led seminal work published in the New England Journal of Medicine that established the foundational tobacco use estimates from the Population Assessment of Tobacco and Health (PATH) Study, a nationally representative, longitudinal study of youth and adults in the US. Her work with the International Tobacco Control Policy Evaluation Project (ITC Project), a multinational longitudinal study designed to evaluate tobacco control policies guided by the World Health Organization Framework Convention on Tobacco Control, has evaluated both proximal and distal effects of various policies enacted in countries throughout the world.
Positions
- Assistant Professor of Oncology
- Department of Health Behavior
Background
Education and Training:
- PhD, Educational Psychology and Quantitative Methods, State University of New York at Buffalo, Buffalo, NY
- Certificate of Advanced Study in Applied Statistical Analysis, State University of New York at Buffalo, Buffalo, NY
Research
Research Overview:
Dr. Kasza’s research focuses on leveraging large-scale population-based datasets to investigate the mechanisms that underlie how various tobacco control policies and other environmental events exert their impacts on behavioral changes occurring in the ‘real-world.’ By employing innovative statistical techniques, Dr. Kasza’s work has bridged the divide between findings from studies of differing research designs; for example, through use of novel statistical control, her work demonstrated that clinical trial-indicated efficacy of smoking cessation medications translates into real-world medication effectiveness when used as directed by smokers trying to quit in the general population.
Dr. Kasza is currently Principal Investigator of two R21 grants supported by the National Institute on Drug Abuse, National Institutes of Health, one of which is examining how e-cigarette design features such as flavors and device types impact cigarette initiation, cessation and relapse, and one of which is examining how the most recent US federal tobacco control initiatives have impacted adolescents’ behaviors alongside contemporaneous impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic and the US outbreak of e-cigarette-associated lung injuries.
Publications
Kasza KA, Ambrose BK, Conway KP, Borek N, Taylor K, Goniewicz ML, Cummings KM, Sharma E, Pearson JL, Green VR, Kaufman AR, Bansal-Travers M, Travers MJ, Kwan J, Tworek C, Cheng YC, Yang L, Pharris-Ciurej N, van Bemmel DM, Backinger CL, Compton WM, Hyland AJ. Tobacco-Product Use by Adults and Youths in the United States in 2013 and 2014. N Engl J Med. 2017 Jan 26;376(4):342-353. doi: 10.1056/NEJMsa1607538.
Kasza KA, Hyland AJ, Borland R, McNeill AD, Bansal-Travers M, Fix BV, Hammond D, Fong GT, Cummings KM. Effectiveness of stop-smoking medications: findings from the International Tobacco Control (ITC) Four Country Survey. Addiction. 2013 Jan;108(1):193-202. doi: 10.1111/j.1360-0443.2012.04009.x. Epub 2012 Aug 14. PMID: 22891869; PMCID: PMC3500450.
Kasza KA, Edwards KC, Anesetti-Rothermel A, Creamer MR, Cummings KM, Niaura RS, Sharma A, Pitts SR, Head SK, Everard CD, Hatsukami DK, Hyland A. E-cigarette use and change in plans to quit cigarette smoking among adult smokers in the United States: Longitudinal findings from the PATH Study 2014-2019. Addict Behav. 2021 Sep 22;124:107124. doi: 10.1016/j.addbeh.2021.107124. Epub ahead of print. PMID: 34598012.
Kasza KA, Bansal-Travers M, O'Connor RJ, Compton WM, Kettermann A, Borek N, Fong GT, Cummings KM, Hyland AJ. Cigarette smokers' use of unconventional tobacco products and associations with quitting activity: findings from the ITC-4 U.S. cohort. Nicotine Tob Res. 2014 Jun;16(6):672-81. doi: 10.1093/ntr/ntt212. Epub 2013 Dec 27. PMID: 24376276; PMCID: PMC4015089.
Kasza KA, Edwards KC, Tang Z, Stanton CA, Sharma E, Halenar MJ, Taylor KA, Donaldson EA, Hull LC, Bansal-Travers M, Limpert J, Zandberg I, Gardner LD, Hammad HT, Borek N, Kimmel HL, Compton WM, Hyland A. Correlates of tobacco product cessation among youth and adults in the USA: findings from the PATH Study Waves 1-3 (2013-2016). Tob Control. 2020 May;29(Suppl 3):s203-s215. doi: 10.1136/tobaccocontrol-2019-055255. PMID: 32321854; PMCID: PMC7520817