Dear School of Medicine Community,
Dr. Ling earned her medical degree and completed a residency in medicine at UCSF, followed by a fellowship at the UCSF Center for AIDS Prevention Studies. She joined the faculty at UCSF in 2002.
Dr. Ling is an internal medicine specialist and primary care doctor. Her research investigates the intersection of tobacco use, media, and social marketing as it relates to young people, and focuses on understanding how tobacco marketing encourages youth and young adults to begin using tobacco, and how to apply the same strategies to improve tobacco control programs. She has extended her work to address the youth vaping epidemic, including a new randomized controlled trial of a social media program to help teens quit vaping.
In addition to her focused research, Dr. Ling has taken on extensive mentoring and teaching responsibilities across many social science disciplines, including directing the postdoctoral fellowship in tobacco research since 2004, and serving as a co-investigator, training program director, and executive committee member of the $20 million Tobacco Center of Regulatory Science (TCORS) at UCSF, since its inception.
Dr. Ling is a co-leader of two programs in the UCSF Helen Diller Family Comprehensive Cancer Center: the Cancer Control Program and the Tobacco Task Force of SF CAN, a collaborative effort to engage health care systems, government, and community groups throughout San Francisco to reduce cancer across the city and beyond. She is a member of the American Public Health Association, American College of Physicians, Society for Research on Nicotine and Tobacco, American Society for Clinical Investigation, and Society for General Internal Medicine.
Dr. Ling has over a decade of tobacco policy experience, including an appointment by the California State Senate in 2007 to the Tobacco Education and Research Oversight Committee (TEROC), which oversees California’s tobacco control, research and school tobacco programs. In addition to her work on three Surgeon General’s reports on tobacco, she regularly submits public comment to the FDA regarding tobacco regulatory policy.
I am confident that Dr. Ling’s innovative research and deep commitment to cross-disciplinary teaching and training, combined with her extensive experience with tobacco policy leadership in California, will be an asset to the CTCRE’s continued efforts to fight the tobacco industry and bring an end to the tobacco epidemic.
I want to express my deep appreciation to Stanton Glantz, PhD, who served as Director of the CTCRE for 20 years. I would also like to thank the search committee, chaired by Jennifer Grandis, MD for their work in considering an exceptional pool of candidates from across the country for this position.
Sincerely,
Talmadge E. King, Jr., MD
Dean, School of Medicine
