February 26, 2025 | Erin Bluvas, bluvase@sc.edu

Health promotion, education, and behavior (HPEB) professor Jim Thrasher is the inaugural recipient of the Excellence in Scientific Leadership and Collaboration Award. Bestowed by the Mexican National Institute of Public Health (INSP) – Latin America’s leading public health research and training institution – the honor reflects the tobacco policy and communications expert’s efforts to reduce tobacco use over the past 25 years, including his many international partnerships throughout Latin America and beyond. 

“This award recognizes Dr. Thrasher for his outstanding public health research, focused on the factors that influence tobacco consumption, as well as the promotion and evaluation of tobacco control policies,” says Eduardo C. Lazcano Ponce, INSP Executive Director. “His leadership in innovative projects and scientific contributions has been key to designing effective policies and promoting regulations and campaigns to prevent tobacco use in Mexico and Latin America.”

Originally from Southern California, Thrasher’s personal and family history of smoking and its health consequences first sparked his interest in the topic. He completed degrees at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (B.A. in Psychology) and the State University of New York in Buffalo (M.A. in Cultural Anthropology; M.S. in Epidemiology), where he was a National Cancer Institute Training Fellow and a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Health Communication Fellow before returning to Chapel Hill for his Ph.D. in Health Behavior & Health Education.

“I was knocking on doors at the Mexican National Institute of Public Health in 2001, the year when they founded their tobacco research department – which was serendipity since I planned to do my doctoral research on that topic,” Thrasher says. “It was also when the global tobacco control movement was gaining momentum. I have been extremely fortunate to ride this wave and contribute to such an important global health initiative, especially through my sustained collaborations with the INSP.”

During his doctoral program, he was a UNC Graduate School Royster Society Fellow and a research policy analyst at the Research Triangle Institute. Following a predoctoral fellowship with the National Cancer Institute, Thrasher secured a Fulbright Fellowship from the Institute of International Education to support his dissertation research in Mexico. He stayed in Mexico from 2005 to 2006 to complete a postdoctoral research fellowship with the INSP in partnership with the Institute for Health Research and Policy at the University of Illinois, Chicago.

To evaluate tobacco policies, it was during this time that Thrasher organized a cohort of smokers that was expanded and followed through 2014, using funding from both the US National Institutes of Health and the Mexican National Council on Science and Technology. This work also coincided with a period of great global progress in promoting and implementing the World Health Organization’s Framework Convention on Tobacco Control.  This month, this first-ever international public health treaty celebrates 20 years of existence, over which millions of lives have been saved by the tobacco control policies the treaty promotes.  

After completing his fellowship in 2006, Thrasher took a position with USC where he’s been leading research, teaching and mentoring students ever since. Besides his appointment in the HPEB department, he serves as the co-director for the Arnold School’s Global Health Initiative.

Over the past dozen years, Thrasher has led seven National Institutes of Health-funded R01 projects. Five of these projects included collaborations with the Mexican INSP – mostly related to tobacco communications and policy, but with recent expansions to include evaluation of Mexico’s innovative nutrition labeling policy. Another current R01 collaboration aims to understand how online social networks promote tobacco and e-cigarette use among Mexican and U.S. teens, with the goal of informing prevention strategies. In addition to NIH-funded grants, Thrasher has worked with Mexican collaborators on projects funded by other agencies, such as Bloomberg Philanthropies and the United Kingdon Medical Research Council, which have directly informed tobacco policy advocacy and development in Mexico and other Latin American countries.

Along with this latest award, Thrasher is the recipient of the Arnold School of Public Health Faculty Research Award (2014), WHO’s World No Tobacco Day Award for the Americas (2016), and the USC Educational Foundation Research Award for Health Sciences (2020). He served on the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s Tobacco Products Scientific Advisory Committee from 2016 to 2022.

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