In 2018, an estimated 34.2 million American adults were current cigarette smokers, with 74.6 percent of people who smoke using tobacco daily (CDC, 2019). While this number has decreased over recent decades, the ways in which youths and adults intake nicotine continues to change as the products available to them change.

2018 also saw nearly 100,000 teens in the US smoke daily in the previous month (CDC, 2022; SAMHSA, 2019). In 2014 approximately one third of people with HIV receiving care smoked cigarettes, while nearly 17 percent of the general adult population smoked cigarettes in the (CDC, 2022; Frazier et al., 2018). Additionally, people with mental illness smoke approximately half of all cigarettes sold in the US. As you can imagine, smoking cigarettes seriously affects the ability to live long and healthy lives for many. In our lab we are working hard to try to understand why vulnerable populations are especially prone to cigarette smoking and to try to find new ways of helping them quit.

Drs. Jennifer Tidey, Suzanne Colby, Rachel Cassidy, Patricia Cioe, and Alexander Sokolovsky are the Primary Investigators of this lab. Their research is funded by numerous grants from the National Institutes of Health (NIH). The SHARe lab is located at Brown University’s Center for Alcohol & Addiction Studies.