Departmental Affiliations
Center & Institute Affiliations
Joanna Cohen, PhD, MHSc, is Chair of the Department of Health, Behavior & Society. She conducts research and capacity building to inform and advance interventions to eliminate tobacco-caused death and disease.
Contact Info
Research Interests
tobacco control; public health policy; tobacco industry; policy evaluation; ethics
Additional Links
Experiences & Accomplishments
Joanna Cohen (she/her) is the Bloomberg Professor of Disease Prevention and the Director of the Institute for Global Tobacco Control at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. She also holds an appointment in the Dalla Lana School of Public Health at the University of Toronto. Dr. Cohen obtained her PhD in Health Policy and Administration from the University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill and her MHSc in Community Health and Epidemiology from the University of Toronto. She has been involved in tobacco policy research for over 25 years. Trained in epidemiology and health policy, her research interests focus on the factors that affect the adoption and implementation of public health policies and on evaluating the beneficial effects and the unintended consequences of such policies. She has worked on studies of both US and Canadian legislators regarding tobacco and tobacco control policy, a longitudinal cohort of smokers focusing on factors influencing quitting behavior, tobacco promotion at the point of sale, tobacco prices including taxes, tobacco packaging, options for reducing the physical availability of tobacco products, and tobacco industry interference in tobacco control.
Dr. Cohen has been recognized for her teaching and mentoring, and has co-led a 6-year training program in public health policy.
She is Deputy Editor of the journal Tobacco Control and was recently a voting member of the US Food and Drug Administration's Tobacco Product Scientific Advisory Committee.
Honors & Awards
2004 - Robin Badgley Award (Teaching, Early Career Category), Department of Public Health Sciences, University of Toronto 2003 - Field Preceptor Award, Department of Public Health Sciences, University of Toronto 2000 - “Mentor of the Year” Award, conferred by the National Mentoring Program of the American Public Health Association
Select Publications
My publications primarily focus on tobacco control policy.
Erinoso O, Smith K, Iacobelli M, Saraf S, Welding K, Cohen JE. A Global Review of Tobacco Product Flavor Policies. Tobacco Control 2020 May 15;tobaccocontrol-2019-055454. doi: 10.1136/tobaccocontrol-2019-055454.
Weiger C, Smith K, Hong A, Cohen JE. Cigarettes Packs with URLs: A Content Analysis of Tobacco Company Websites. Journal of Medical Internet Research 2020 Jun 9;22(6):e15160. doi: 10.2196/15160.
Brown J, Zhu M, Moran M, Hoe C, Frejas F, Cohen JE. 'It has Candy. You Need to Press on it': Young Adults' Perceptions of Flavoured Cigarettes in the Philippines. Tobacco Control 2020 May 23:tobaccocontrol-2019-055524. doi: 10.1136/tobaccocontrol-2019-055524.
Cohen JE, Lee K. State Versus Private Ownership of Tobacco Companies. (Editorial). British Medical Journal 2019; 365:l4056.
Leas E, Nobles A, Caputi T, Dredze M, Zhu SH, Cohen JE, Ayers J. News Coverage of the E-cigarette, or Vaping, product use Associated Lung Injury (EVALI) Outbreak and Internet Searches for Vaping Cessation. Tobacco Control [in press]