Donna Vallone
Senior Vice President, Research and Evaluation
Donna Vallone is American Legacy Foundation’s Senior Vice President of Research and Evaluation. She oversees Legacy’s portfolio of internal, contract and grant-funded research and evaluation studies. Major areas of research include the ongoing evaluation of the truth® campaign, a youth-oriented tobacco countermarketing campaign, and evaluation of EX, Legacy’s cessation campaign for adult smokers.
Dr. Vallone’s specific research interest focuses on tobacco-related health disparities. She is an active member of the National Cancer Institute’s Tobacco-related Health Disparities Research Network (TReND), a transdisciplinary research initiative with the mission of eliminating tobacco-related disparities by translating scientific knowledge into practice, and informing public policy. She recently published “How Reliable and Valid is the Brief Sensation Seeking Scale (BSSS-4) for Youth of Various Racial/Ethnic Groups?” (Addiction. 2007;102(Suppl 2):71-78). This study found that a sensation seeking measure now commonly used in the development of public education campaigns does not perform as well among African American youth as compared to white youth. This important finding has implications for effectively reaching and influencing African American youth to reduce tobacco use. Dr. Vallone is currently working on a study to examine how differential media exposure, socioeconomic status and race can serve to create knowledge differences, which may, in turn, exacerbate tobacco-related health disparities. In 2006, Dr. Vallone served as co-editor of a special issue of the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health, which focused on tobacco control policy and women of low-socioeconomic status.
Dr. Vallone’s recent peer-reviewed publications include: “A Closer Look at Smoking among Young Adults: Where Should Tobacco Control Focus Its Attention?” (American Journal of Public Health, Aug. 2007); “How Reliable and Valid is the Brief Sensation Seeking Scale (BSSS-4) for Youth of Various Racial/Ethnic Groups?” (Addiction, Oct. 2007); “Women's Knowledge of the Leading Causes of Cancer Death (Nicotine and Tobacco Research, July, 2007); “Findings and Implications from a National Study on Potential Reduced Exposure Products (PREPs)” Nicotine and Tobacco Research, Dec. 2006); “Televised Movie Trailers: Undermining Restrictions on Advertising Tobacco to Youth” (Archives of Pediatric and Adolescent Medicine, Sept., 2006), and; “Smoking, Obesity, and their Co-occurrence in the United States: Cross Sectional Analysis” (British Medical Journal, July, 2006).
Dr. Vallone received her masters’ degree in Community Health Education from New York University, and her doctoral degree in Sociomedical Sciences, an interdisciplinary degree merging sociology and public health, from Columbia University.