I am an Associate Professor in the Department of Health, Behavior and Society at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, and the Director of the CDC-funded Center on Alcohol Marketing and Youth. I teach courses on social and behavioral aspects of health, media advocacy, and alcohol policy. Previously I co-founded and worked at the Center on Alcohol Marketing and Youth at Georgetown University. I have also taught at Mills College in Oakland. I co-founded the Marin Institute for the Prevention of Alcohol and Other Drug Problems, and worked there for 13 years.
I am the author of Thirsting for Markets: The Global Impact of Corporate Alcohol, was principal author of the World Health Organization's recent Global Status Report on Alcohol and Global Status Report on Alcohol and Youth, and co-authored Media Advocacy and Public Health: Power for Prevention, and Alcohol in the Developing World: A Public Health Perspective, published by WHO and the Finnish Foundation for Alcohol Studies and winner of the Addiction Book Prize. I served as a member of the WHO Director-General's Alcohol Policy Strategy Advisory Committee, and have worked as an expert advisor to both WHO and the World Bank. I have consulted with and trained thousands of public health advocates, and authored numerous peer-reviewedarticles and training curricula on environmental approaches to prevention, media advocacy, and the prevention of alcohol-related problems.
Although my current work is more in public health than sociology, I view it as a natural extension of the worldview of Berkeley sociology, as I have contributed to a paradigm shift away from an understanding of alcohol issues as private and individual, and towards a view of the problems and their solutions as public and systemic. I have always valued thinking and asking questions sociologically, and I appreciate Berkeley for encouraging that.