Karen S. Hudmon, DrPH, MS, RPh, CTTS, is Professor of Pharmacy Practice at the Purdue University College of Pharmacy and Clinical Professor at the University of California San Francisco School of Pharmacy. She’s a licensed pharmacist and a cancer prevention researcher with 30 years of tobacco research experience and has personally provided tobacco cessation training to more than 30,000 health professionals.

Karen was one of the original authors of the Rx for Change: Clinician-Assisted Tobacco Cessation training program, which is used globally to train students and licensed clinicians to apply evidence-based approaches for helping patients quit. Currently, Karen’s research is funded by the NIH and the Indiana State Department of Health. She testified in favor of legislation to advance Indiana pharmacists’ role in prescribing cessation medications, was instrumental in drafting the statewide protocol, and is leading statewide training efforts.

Over the past 40 years, Rebecca has worked nationally and internationally in many areas of public health marketing and behavior change, including the Tobacco Control Programs for New York State and Vermont, the Ford Foundation, the US Embassy in the Dominican Republic, Planned Parenthood International Federation and Planned Parenthood Federation of America (where she was national Director of Social Marketing), and trained national grantees for Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) to embed behavior change into programs.

She has been on the editorial board for Social Marketing Quarterly since 2013.

She currently holds a legislative appointment to the Vermont Substance Misuse Prevention Oversight and Advisory Council, which advises the Governor and legislature on policy for tobacco, alcohol, marijuana, and prescription drugs.

Her profile as a social marketer in public health is the first inclusion of social marketing in the recently published third edition of 101+ Careers In Public Health published by Columbia University.

Rhonda Williams, MES, Director of the Vermont Department of Health’s Tobacco Control Program in addition to the state’s Alzheimer’s and Healthy Aging and Asthma Management Programs, has been working in the field of tobacco prevention and treatment for nearly fifteen years. Ms. Williams has her Master of Environmental Studies from the Yale School of Environment and was first introduced to tobacco control policy working on Smoke free Chicago as Director of Programs and Policy for the Respiratory Health Association of Metropolitan Chicago. She has worked on various initiatives to advance prevention strategies, and tobacco treatment and smoke free interventions in public and rental housing, colleges, state-owned facilities, behavioral and substance use settings. Since 2011 Rhonda has been the Principal Investigator for the state’s Tobacco Control Program. Ms. Williams works on several health system initiatives including with the state Medicaid office on reducing barriers and increasing cessation to lower historically high smoking rates among Medicaid-insured, uninsured and populations targeted by the tobacco industry including Vermonters belonging to the LGBTQ, BIPOC, behavioral health, women, youth, and young adult communities. She serves on the Community Advisory Board for the ABCD study in Vermont and on the study team PACE VT, both of which assess substance use impact on adolescents and young adults.