UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — As a teenager, Naomi Bird began noticing something peculiar. As if seemingly overnight, her peers began vaping. She and her friends were targeted by ads and impressions. The trend peaked in the U.S. from 2020 to 2022, growing 46% during that time, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The rise and fall of e-cigarettes — particularly among youths — is something Bird is working to understand. She’s a third-year undergraduate student at Penn State, with a dual major in geography and comparative literature, and is completing research related to e-cigarette marketing to teens through Penn State’s Scales of Corporate Harm Lab, housed in the Department of Geography.
“I’m 20 now, so I saw it happening in real time and so quickly,” Bird said. “This research is giving me so much more insight into how young people are being targeted by these big companies.”
Bird worked with Emily Rosenman and Louisa Holmes, both associate professors of geography, to analyze how e-cigarette makers market their products.
“Corporations will always have bigger budgets than public health, but we can learn from their strategies to engage in counterstrategies that serve the public interest,” Holmes said.
As a postdoctoral scholar, Holmes worked at the Center for Tobacco Control Research and Education at the University of California, San Francisco, which hosts the Industry Documents Library. It’s a library of documents from industries such as food and beverage, chemical, pharmaceutical and tobacco. She has used industry documents to explore many topics, including how the tobacco industry targeted young adults.
The geography lab’s work is part of a larger effort for researchers to map the data of public health crises such as vaping and the opioid epidemic to better understand prevention methods. Holmes and Rosenman said Bird’s work will contribute to research in academic journals and will spur a larger project at the intersections of e-cigarette marketing and public health.