Webinars

SCLC's webinar series is integral to the technical assistance provided by the SCLC. Nationally recognized smoking cessation experts offer the latest information related to smoking cessation (including effective interventions) for the general and the behavioral health populations.

The Goals of SCLC’s Webinar Series:

  • Provide training and technical assistance to raise awareness of the many benefits smoking cessation efforts and to increase understanding of effective smoking cessation strategies.
  • Implement or enhance existing tobacco cessation services using evidence-based practices.
  • Ensure that consumers and staff have access to smoking cessation services and support to promote health and wellness.
  • Establish partnerships between behavioral health and nicotine cessation organizations to increase available tobacco cessation resources in communities. 

SCLC has over 100 webinars covering the latest topics on tobacco addiction and recovery

 

Current Webinars

The Cancer Moonshot: What's Menthol and Emotional Brain Training Got To Do With It? Everything! co-hosted by the National Behavioral Health Network for Tobacco & Cancer Control

-

Speakers

Valerie Yerger, ND

Professor, Social Behavioral Sciences, School of Nursing, University of California, San Francisco and a Founding Member of the African American Tobacco Control Leadership Council (AATCLC)

For over twenty years, Dr. Yerger has dedicated her research and advocacy to framing the disproportionate burden of tobacco use among marginalized communities as a pressing social injustice. Her work has profoundly shaped public health policies aimed at effectively reaching and engaging these communities. By analyzing previously hidden tobacco industry documents, Dr. Yerger has exposed the industry's connections with African American leadership groups, the accumulation of nicotine in melanin-rich tissues, the targeted marketing of menthol cigarettes in inner-city neighborhoods, and the industry’s internal research on the use of menthol as an additive in cigarettes. Dr. Yerger has made groundbreaking contributions to understanding the factors driving tobacco use among disadvantaged populations. Her innovative approach addresses the demand side of the tobacco epidemic, highlighting how social and political determinants of health create barriers to tobacco prevention and smoking cessation. She is deeply committed to leveraging community-based research to engage advocates in the public health policy process. As a founding member of the African American Tobacco Control Leadership Council (AATCLC), she helped spearhead a national movement to remove menthol cigarettes and other flavored tobacco products from the U.S. marketplace.

For decades, Dr. Yerger has been drawing attention to the need for culturally tailored cessation approaches, especially for Black Americans and other groups heavily impacted by menthol cigarettes and evolving policy changes. Dr. Yerger has provided expert guidance to the CDC’s Office on Smoking and Health, aiding in the development of targeted messages for the TIPs Campaign aimed at those who smoke menthol cigarettes. In June 2023, she was invited to the White House’s Cancer Moonshot Initiative forum on smoking cessation. After making comments about how stress needed to be addressed as a major driver of smoking in any effort to reduce tobacco-related disparities, Dr. Yerger’s input was requested by the Initiative’s staff. Dr. Yerger formed a collaborative team with members from the AATCLC, the University of California San Francisco’s Smoking Cessation Leadership Center and Center for Tobacco Control Research and Education, and other colleagues. This collaborative effort resulted in the creation of an electronic magazine to promote a free, scalable mobile app designed to provide rapid-acting stress management tools. The launch of this “e-zine” in February 2024 resulted in a remarkable 700% increase in app downloads within the first four months. Her extensive expertise in tobacco control, community engagement, policy leadership, and training has been widely recognized, as evidenced by the numerous awards she has received, including the UCSF Chancellor Award for Public Service, the State of California Tobacco Control Program’s Carol M. Russell Award for Leadership and Vision in Tobacco Control, the Public Health Law Center’s Game Changer Award, the Truth Initiative’s Sybil G. Jacobs Outstanding Use of Tobacco Industry Documents, and most recently, the UCSF Claire D. Brindis Award for Community Engagement.

Webinar Objectives:

These objectives incorporate smoking cessation into the broader context of social determinants of health, chronic stress, and tobacco industry targeting.

  1. Explain how factors contributing to chronic stress in vulnerable populations pose specific challenges to smoking cessation; attendees will be able to express the need for tailored smoking cessation programs that also address community assets.
  2. Explain Emotional Brain Training and identify the basic neuroscience principles behind a free innovative mobile app and its utility as a stress management tool that can be added into smoking cessation strategies.
  3. Explain how addressing chronic stress was integrated into the White House Cancer Moonshot Initiative.
  4. Describe how the presence of menthol cigarettes in the U.S. marketplace undermines the Cancer Moonshot Initiative goals of supporting smoking cessation efforts and reducing cancer disparities.

Upcoming Webinars

The Curious Science of Cravings

-

Speakers

Judson A. Brewer, MD, PhD

Professor, Director of Research and Innovation, Mindfulness Center, Department of Behavioral and Social Sciences, Brown University School of Public Health, Department of Psychiatry, The Warren Alpert Medical School of Brown University

Jud Brewer MD PhD (“Dr. Jud”) is a New York Times best-selling author and thought leader in the field of habit change and the “science of self-mastery”, having combined over 25 years of experience with mindfulness training with his scientific research therein. He is the Director of Research and Innovation at the Mindfulness Center and professor in Behavioral and Social Sciences and Psychiatry at the Schools of Public Health & Medicine at Brown University. A psychiatrist and internationally known expert in mindfulness training for addictions, Brewer has developed and tested novel mindfulness programs for habit change, including both in-person and app-based treatments for smoking, emotional eating, and anxiety. He has also studied the underlying neural mechanisms of mindfulness using standard and real-time fMRI and EEG neurofeedback. He has trained US Olympic athletes and coaches, foreign government ministers, and his work has been featured on 60 Minutes, TED (4th most viewed talk of 2016, with 20+ Million views), the New York Times, Time magazine (top 100 new health discoveries of 2013), Forbes, BBC, NPR, Al Jazeera (documentary about his research), Businessweek and others. His work has been funded by the National Institutes of Health, American Heart Association, among others. Dr. Brewer founded MindSciences (which merged with Sharecare Inc. in 2020) to move his discoveries of clinical evidence behind mindfulness for anxiety, eating, smoking and other behavior change into the hands of consumers (see www.drjud.com for more information). In 2023, he co-founded Mindshift Recovery, a non-profit that brings together digital health and peer support to help individuals with addiction. He is the author of The Craving Mind: from cigarettes to smartphones to love, why we get hooked and how we can break bad habits (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017), the New York Times best-seller, Unwinding Anxiety: New Science Shows How to Break the Cycles of Worry and Fear to Heal Your Mind (Avery/Penguin Random House, 2021) and the forthcoming book The Hunger Habit: why we eat when we’re not hungry and how to stop (Avery/Penguin Random House, 2024).

Webinar Objectives:

  1.  Describe how habits are formed and perpetuated

  1. Explain how mindfulness affects reward valuation in the brain

  1. Discuss how mindfulness approaches can help change addictive habit patterns