Our Voice & Actions

I am a public health researcher by training and have focused most of my career on understanding why certain communities are more affected by health disparities than others. I joined Altria in 2018 and worked in Regulatory Sciences to support our Premarket Tobacco Applications and Modified Risk Tobacco Product applications and conducted research to understand the tobacco use landscape. Our colleagues in Corporate Citizenship were among my primary stakeholders and clients for the work that we did for underage tobacco prevention. Now that I'm in Corporate Citizenship, I make strategic level decisions, informed by the research, to improve our approach to cessation support and underage prevention of not only tobacco, but other risky behaviors.

The cessation strategy to date has really centered around QuitAssist^®. QuitAssist has been a hallmark program, a website designed to connect people who decided to quit tobacco with cessation resources. So far, guiding the process of building our cessation strategy out and thinking about whether we should go beyond QuitAssist has been interesting.

We're seeing significant changes in the tobacco landscape as manufacturers invest strategically in order to expand their portfolio to a wide spectrum of products, designed to meet their adult consumers anywhere on their journey, including products for adult tobacco users who want to quit. My goal is to make sure that we know where we should be positioned, both regarding underage prevention and cessation support, and how Altria can best contribute to the landscape.

In the future, I plan to enhance the connection between the research from regulatory sciences and the work that we do in the Corporate Citizenship department. Additionally, I aim to build a strategy that's equitable for the adult consumers who have the most trouble getting access to cessation resources and successfully quit tobacco use.

 

I want to help Altria maximize its impact by creating strategy through a lens of equity and authenticity.

 

It's been a privilege to work at Altria, where underage prevention and cessation support is such a priority. I’m looking forward to completing and implementing the strategy and then seeing the impact that it makes over time, especially since we're focused on equitable cessation support. If the conditions are right, the possibilities are endless.