Mahabee-Gittens To Give NCI Seminar

Dr. E. Melinda Mahabee-Gittens will present the next lecture in the NCI Center to Reduce Cancer Health Disparities Continuing Umbrella of Research Experiences (CURE) Distinguished Scholars Seminar (DSS) Series on Thursday, May 5 from 1 to 2:30 p.m., via WebEx. Her talk is titled, “Tobacco Control in the Pediatric Healthcare Setting.” 

A two-time CURE scholar, Mahabee-Gittens is professor of pediatrics, University of Cincinnati College of Medicine, and professor of research and attending physician, Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center, Division of Emergency Medicine. 

Preventing and reducing tobacco smoke exposure in children is the principal goal of her research. She provides parents and adolescents with tobacco prevention, tobacco cessation and secondhand smoke reduction counseling both in the research and clinical settings. She has extensive research experience in survey design and tobacco intervention development and primary quantitative data collection and analysis. 

Mahabee-Gittens has published more than 100 authored or co-authored manuscripts in peer-reviewed academic journals. In addition to her CURE K22 and K23 awards, she has earned an Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality R03, an NCI R21, three NIH R01s, the Charlotte R. Schmidlapp Woman Scholars Award and support from the American Lung Association. 

She completed her medical degree at State University of New York (SUNY) at Brooklyn, her residency at the Children’s Hospital at Yale-New Haven and her fellowship and Ph.D. at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center and the University of Cincinnati, respectively.

Among many honors Mahabee-Gittens has received are the Preventive Medicine Alumni Award from SUNY Health Science Center at Brooklyn, the Leonard P. Rome Award and the American Academy of Pediatrics Award to the Smoke Free Families program team. In addition, the Society for Research on Nicotine & Tobacco appointed Mahabee-Gittens to its fellows program. 

The seminar series recognizes former CURE scholars and champions who are making seminal contributions to the fields of cancer and cancer health disparities research. The series began in 2017 and lectures are held semiannually. 

Click here to register. If you are an individual with a disability who needs reasonable accommodation to participate in this event, email Victoria Coan (victoria.coan@nih.gov) preferably at least 5 business days before the event.