Prof Geoffrey T. Fong, OC, Ph.D., FRSC, FCAHS

Founder and Chief Principal Investigator of the International Tobacco Control Policy Evaluation Project

Professor of Psychology and Public Health and Health Systems, University of Waterloo

Biography

Dr. Fong is Professor of Psychology and Public Health Sciences at the University of Waterloo and Senior Investigator at the Ontario Institute for Cancer Research. Dr. Fong is Founder and Chief Principal Investigator of the International Tobacco Control Policy Evaluation Project (the ITC Project), a large international consortium of 150 researchers across 31 countries, covering over half of the world’s population and over two-thirds of the world’s tobacco users. One major objective of the ITC Project is to evaluate the impact of national-level tobacco control policies of the WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control. Another major objective of the ITC Project is to measure and understand the use of nicotine vaping products, heated tobacco products, and other new nicotine products—their interaction with cigarettes, and importantly the interaction between policies on these nicotine products and policies on cigarettes in their impact on use of these products, transitions between these products, and the perceptions and beliefs that underlie and predict changes in product use, with the multi-country design allowing for comparisons between countries that vary in their regulatory approaches to these products. Dr. Fong was a member of the 7-person WHO FCTC Impact Assessment Expert Group, serving as its Technical Coordinator, which conducted the official impact assessment of the treaty over its first decade (2005-15). He has served as a member of Canada’s Vaping Products Scientific Advisory Board and the WHO Expert Group on COVID-19 and Tobacco Use. Among Dr. Fong’s awards are a WHO World No Tobacco Day Award, Luther Terry Award for Outstanding Research Contribution, American Association for Public Opinion Research Policy Impact Award, John Slade Award from the Society for Research on Nicotine and Tobacco, and the Governor General’s Innovation Award. In 2021, Dr. Fong was appointed as an Officer of the Order of Canada.