Jidong Huang

Ph.D. in Economics, University of Illinois at Chicago, 2007
M.A. in Economics, University of Illinois at Chicago, 2004
B.A. in Economics, Ren Min (People's) University of China in Beijing, 2000

Health equity and economic impact of public policies regulating health behaviors and products, with an emphasis on use of tobacco, alcohol, and cannabis products and epidemiology of diverse health behaviors.

Dr. Jidong Huang is Professor of Health Management & Policy in the Department of Health Policy and Behavioral Sciences within Georgia State University’s (GSU) School of Public Health (SPH). Dr. Huang is a GSU Second Century Initiative (2CI) Scholar in Tobacco Regulatory Science, and the recipient of GSU’s 2022 Outstanding Faculty Achievement Award and GSU SPH’s 2020 Excellence in Research Award.

Dr. Huang’s research primarily focuses on three key areas. Firstly, his work involves the evaluation of the health equity and economic impact of public policies regulating health behaviors and products, with an emphasis on use of tobacco, alcohol, and cannabis products. Secondly, Dr. Huang’s research delves into the epidemiology of diverse health behaviors. This involves an examination of their prevalence, distribution, temporal trends, patterns of usage, and their multifaceted determinants that encompass social, economic, and commercial factors. To achieve this, a wide array of data sources is harnessed, ranging from surveys to extensive big data repositories. The third research area involves employing experimental methodologies and other causal inference approaches to identify and evaluate health behavioral interventions that hold the potential to improve health outcomes and contribute notably to areas such as cancer prevention and control. Furthermore, this line of research strives to address the broader domain of noncommunicable diseases, promoting prevention and control measures that can benefit population health as a whole.

Dr. Huang possesses substantial research expertise across a wide spectrum of topics, encompassing substance (tobacco, alcohol, cannabis) prevention and control, social and commercial determinants of health, health disparity and health equity, health policy evaluation, behavioral interventions for promoting better health outcomes and global health. In the past fourteen years, Dr. Huang has undertaken extensive research endeavors in the area of substance prevention and control, evaluating a wide array of policies and interventions, such as tobacco and alcohol prices and taxes, smoke free-air policies, graphic warning labels, point-of-sale advertising restrictions, point-of-sale display bans, anti-tobacco media campaigns, minimum pricing laws, state zero tolerance laws pertaining to alcohol use,  and state policies regulating the medicinal and recreational use of cannabis products. In recent years, Dr. Huang’s research focus has been directed towards comprehensively examining the public health ramifications of e-cigarettes in the context of the rapidly changing industry strategies to promote, and the subsequent public policies to regulate, the use of e-cigarettes among youth and young adults. Dr. Huang has published over 95 peer-reviewed articles in these research areas, many of which in high impact journals such as: American Journal of Public Health, American Journal of Preventive Medicine, Lancet Global Health, Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, JAMA Network Open, Tobacco Control, Nicotine & Tobacco Research, PLoS One, and Health Economics. More than 20 of the articles Dr. Huang authored and co-authored have an Attention Score in the top 5% of all research outputs scored by Altmetric.

Dr. Huang’s research has been funded by the NCI, NIDA, FDA, NIH Fogarty International Center, and CDC. He is the co-PI of an NIH/Fogarty-funded R01 that assesses the efficacy of an mHealth-based intervention in reducing smoking rates in low- and middle-income countries, and the Principal Investigator of an NCI/FDA-funded R01 project that examines the impact of e-cigarette marketing. In addition, Dr. Huang is also a key co-investigator on several large research projects funded by NIH, CDC and RWJF. Additionally, Dr. Huang was a contributing author to the 2016 Surgeon General Report on E-cigarette Use among Youth and Young Adults, and a contributing author to the 2017 National Cancer Institute’s/World Health Organization’s Monograph on the Economics of Tobacco and Tobacco Control. He has served as an ad hoc grant reviewer for multiple panels for the National Institutes of Health. In addition, he is a member of the Evaluation Task Force for the California Tobacco Control Program.

Dr. Huang’ research has been featured and reported by the New York Times (editorial), the Wall Street Journal (5 times), the Washington Post (2 times), USA Today (front page story, 2 times), the Financial Times, the Guardian, Bloomberg Business, Vox, Chicago Tribune, the Huffington Post, CNN, NPR, the Fox News, ABC, NBC, CNBC, CBS, Associated Press, and the Atlanta Journal Constitution, as well as numerous other local, national, and international media outlets.