2020 Faculty

Deputy Director, Tobacco Regulatory Science Program (TRSP), National Institutes of Health (NIH)

Kay Wanke Ph.D., M.P.H. is the Deputy Director of the Tobacco Regulatory Science Program (TRSP) in the NIH Office of Disease Prevention. She co-founded TRSP which coordinates the trans-NIH collaborative effort with the FDA’s Center for Tobacco Products (CTP) to foster tobacco regulatory research, including co-leading the development of TRSP’s signature program for Tobacco Centers of Regulatory Science and spearheading the establishment of the collection of Tobacco Regulatory Research consensus measures available to researchers in the PhenX Toolkit. Dr. Wanke came to the NIH in 2001 as a Cancer Prevention Fellow at the National Cancer Institute, where she examined the behavioral genetics of smoking cessation. She then served as a program official at the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) in the Epidemiology Research Branch where she oversaw a research portfolio including tobacco and substance use, dependence, and genetic epidemiology. At NIDA she was the Project Coordinator for the Network on Exposures to Psychosocial Stress and Addictive Substances, a component of the Genes, Environment, and Health Initiative Exposure Biology Program, which funded the development of new technologies for accurate measurement of environmental exposures and lifestyle factors. Dr. Wanke also served as a health scientist administrator at the NIH Office of Behavioral and Social Sciences Research (OBSSR) where she coordinated and promoted behavioral genetic research, training, programs, and communication across the NIH Institutes. Dr. Wanke received her Ph.D. in clinical psychology from Southern Illinois University at Carbondale, including a pre-doctoral internship at the University of Alabama at Birmingham School of Medicine. She received her M.P.H. at the Harvard School of Public Health.