Faculty Members Receive Grant for Tobacco-free Ambassadors (TAP) Partnership Linking K-12 Schools and Community Colleges Project
College of Nursing Professor Ellen Hahn, PhD, RN, FAAN, and College of Education Assistant Professor Mindy Ickes, PhD, recently received $100,000 from the CVS Health Foundation for their Tobacco-free Ambassadors Partnership (TAP): Linking K-12 Schools and Community Colleges project.
Drs. Hahn and Ickes intend to build a cadre of committed peer health educators from two campuses of a tobacco-free community and technical college to mentor middle and high school students from surrounding Kentucky schools on tobacco prevention and advocacy; engage a rural Kentucky community college and technical system to promote tobacco-free lifestyles by enforcing strong tobacco-free policies; and increase the number of K-12 tobacco-free schools. The expectation is that fewer youth will initiate tobacco use, more youth will be engaged in advocacy and fewer violators will be observed on the community college campuses.
Dr. Hahn is the director of BREATHE (Bridging Research Efforts and Advocacy Toward Healthy Environments) including the Tobacco Policy Research Program, the Kentucky Center for Smoke-free Policy (KCSP) and the Radon Policy Research Program. She is associate director for the Center for Health Services Research, faculty associate at UK’s NCI-designated Markey Cancer Center and facilitator for the Lung Cancer Translational Research Group. Dr. Hahn was inducted as a Fellow into the American Academy of Nursing in 2011.
Dr. Ickes is a faculty associate for the Kentucky Center for Smoke-free Policy and the director of both Tobacco-free Take Action! and Go Tobacco-free, two initiatives to promote tobacco-free college campuses. She teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in health promotion including Program Planning, Health Promotion and Behavior Change and College Health Promotion, and she is coordinator of the health promotion practicum/internship program.
