Eric Donny
Wake Forest University, NC·Public Health & Epidemiology
Vaping has been the most common form of tobacco use among U.S. high school students since 2014, with over 1.7 million teens reporting current use in 2021.
- Fields
Public Health & Epidemiology
Psychology
Medicine & Clinical Research
- Topics
vaping
electronic cigarettes
e-cigarettes
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Apr 2028
What they work on
- Prospectively assess vaping behavior and the emergence of vaping dependence symptoms across high school, using online surveys repeated every six months in a longitudinal cohort of over 3,100 students.
- Describe how vaping relates to adolescent well-being, including traits such as perseverance and connectedness, using survey data plus lab-based assessments collected twice, 18 months apart, in 360 students.
- Use a mixed-methods approach with in-depth interviews of up to 80 students to improve vaping survey measures and understand how changes in vaping, dependence and health affect daily life.
- Screen more than 13,500 high school students to recruit a comparable sample of vaping and non-vaping students, and characterize vaping frequency and intensity across all grade levels.
More about the research
More teens now vape 20 or more days a month, the level of use often tied to dependence. Dependence is a recognized psychiatric condition, but the effects may go further. Adolescence is when thinking, emotional and social skills develop, and those skills support traits like perseverance and feeling connected to others. Nicotine is known to affect these abilities, so vaping may shape overall well-being, not just addiction. This project asks how vaping turns into dependence and how it shapes teens' everyday lives.
Why it matters
Preventing youth vaping depends on knowing which health effects actually matter to teenagers. By mapping how dependence emerges during high school and how vaping relates to a teen's capacity to flourish socially, emotionally and cognitively, this work could supply the evidence base for health communications that reach adolescents on terms they recognize.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Elias Klemperer
University of Vermont, VT·Public Health & Epidemiology
Test whether very low nicotine content cigarettes reduce cigarettes smoked per day and cigarette dependence among adult dual users of cigarettes and e-cigarettes, in a 12-week double-blind randomized trial.
Erin Vogel
University of Oklahoma-Health Sciences Center, OK·Psychology·Early-career
Characterize what kinds of social media content prompt social comparison among teens aged 13–18, using screenshots and surveys sent from a smartphone app during everyday life (ecological momentary assessment).
Neal Doran
University of California-San Diego, CA·Public Health & Epidemiology
Identify modifiable social, contextual and individual risk factors that predict e-cigarette initiation and progression in children, using repeated assessments from the ABCD cohort of youth ages 9 to 19.
The school
Wake Forest University: 27 labs on PI Pages, $345M a year on research, 54 research doctorates a year.
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