Brian Colwell, PhD, MS

Biography

Brian Colwell, Ph.D., is a Professor in the Department of Health Promotion & Community Health at the Texas A&M School of Public Health.  His career has focused on cancer prevention, primarily through tobacco use prevention and cessation. He is the Primary Investigator and co-developer of the Youth Tobacco Awareness Program for adolescents in Texas who are caught purchasing, possessing, or using tobacco.  His primary area of research is on the effects of involuntary treatment on youth tobacco behaviors, using cognitive-behavioral and motivational enhancement approaches.  Additionally, he has begun examining substance use in international settings and seeks to continue making that transition. Dr. Colwell has been a member of the Best Practices in Youth Cessation workgroup sponsored by the National Institutes of Health, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the Canadian Tobacco Control Consortium. He has also been an investigator on several NIH-funded research projects that focused on youth tobacco use and he serves on several scientific study sections for the NIH.  Dr. Colwell is the Director of the Program on Research in Global Health and oversees the Graduate Certificate in Global Health program. Dr. Colwell has also served as a consultant for the Smoke-Free Paso del Norte initiative in the El Paso region of Texas and as an evaluator for the ABCs of Secondhand Smoke Project in Springfield, Missouri. He has expanded his work to examine tobacco use in central Africa as well. Additionally, he participated on several Legacy-funded evaluations of community youth tobacco prevention initiatives. Dr. Colwell has recently begun working with other investigators to examine vaccine hesitancy, both in the United States as well as in the developing world.  Working with colleagues in other departments at the School of Public Health and at other universities, he has examined attitudes toward vaccines across Sub-Saharan Africa. His primary teaching areas are Social Ecology and Global Health, Global Health, the history of public health. He was the 2006 recipient of the CDC Health Promotion Medal of Excellence.