our team

Kurt M. Ribisl, PhD is Jo Anne Earp Distinguished Professor and Chair of Health Behavior at the UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health, Leader of the Cancer Prevention & Control Program at UNC’s Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center, and Co-Founder of CounterTobacco.org and Counter Tools. He is a nationally recognized tobacco control and policy expert and served as a federally appointed member of the FDA Tobacco Products Scientific Advisory Committee from 2012-2016.

Dr. Ribisl’s primary research focus is evaluation and improvement of the reach of population-level efforts to reduce tobacco use, with an emphasis on policy and information technology. Dr. Ribisl is a member of the Editorial Advisory Board for the journal Tobacco Control and is the author of over 185 scientific articles.

Seth M. Noar, PhD is the James Howard and Hallie McLean Parker Distinguished Professor in the UNC Hussman School of Journalism and Media and a member of UNC's Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center.

Dr. Noar has conducted health communication research on the design, implementation, and evaluation of health messages and campaigns for more than 15 years. He has focused much of his research on anti-tobacco messages, including several studies on graphic warning labels for cigarette packs that were cited in FDA’s final graphic warning label rule in 2020.

Dr. Noar served as Associate Director of the Communication Core for the UNC Center for Regulatory Research on Tobacco Communication and is author of more than 160 scientific articles on health communication.

Hannah Prentice-Dunn, MPH, is Program Manager at the UNC Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center. She has worked for ten years in clinical trial management, public health program delivery, and cancer prevention research.

Hannah has collaborated with over 100 hospital, school, and business employers across North Carolina to pass tobacco-free campus policies and to provide employees with tobacco cessation benefits, supported 10 healthcare systems in New York City in adopting comprehensive patient quit-tobacco systems, and contributed to numerous tobacco prevention and control research grants and publications.

Inara Valliani, MPH (she/her) is a program specialist with Vaping Prevention Resource and has been working with UNC Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center since early 2022. She recently earned her MPH with a concentration in Health Behavior from UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health. Inara became passionate about public health after witnessing and experiencing the chronic effects that health disparities pose on the well-being of communities, specifically on people with marginalized identities. She has focused a significant portion of her academic and professional career on health equity, substance use prevention, and tobacco control.

Krysta Gougler-Reeves, MSW, MPH, is a project manager the UNC Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center. Krysta supports public health projects among a collaborative of the UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health, UNC Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center, Fort Bragg Department of Public Health, and Cumberland County Department of Public Health. In prior positions, she provided technical assistance for a maternal and child health home visiting program, conducted systems-building initiatives with early childhood providers, and coordinated support for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities. She received her Master of Public Health and Master of Social Work from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Caroline Ritchie, MPH, is a project manager for the Communicating for Health Impact Lab in the UNC Hussman School of Journalism and Media. She supports work related to vaping prevention messaging for adolescents with Dr. Seth Noar. Prior to this position she has worked with high schoolers in Raleigh supporting the development of an equity based, holistic mental health program and conducting breast cancer cell research. She received her Master of Public Health from the Gillings School of Global Public Health at UNC.

Daniel Hadar is a third-year student at Penn State University, studying public health and Spanish. He joined VPR in May of 2021, and has been working with the coding team since then.