Prof Jonathan Foulds

Professor of Public Health Sciences & Psychiatry

Penn State University, College of Medicine

Biography

Dr. Jonathan Foulds has spent most of his career finding ways to help smokers beat their addiction to tobacco. He has been a principal investigator on grants totaling well over $27 million and has been invited to speak on smoking cessation in more than 15 countries.

Dr Foulds trained as a clinical psychologist at the University of Glasgow, and obtained his PhD at the Institute of Psychiatry, University of London. He worked at St George’s Hospital Medical School as the UK’s first “lecturer in tobacco addiction” and then moved to University of Surrey and continued to work as a principal clinical psychologist at Broadmoor Hospital, a large maximum security facility for mentally disordered offenders. He has spent most of his career developing and evaluating methods to help smokers beat their addiction to tobacco. He was on the Management Group of the Hungarian Anti-Smoking Campaign (1995-6), has been a technical leader of a World Health Organization project to improve the regulation of tobacco dependence treatment in Europe (2000), and was Director of Research for the UK charity, Quit, which ran the largest telephone helpline for smokers in the world at that time. From 2000-2010 he was the director of the Tobacco Dependence Program at the University of Medicine & Dentistry of New Jersey (now Rutgers) – School of Public Health. Although primarily funded for service activities, TDP program members published over 90 articles on tobacco during that period. He has been a principle investigator or co-PI on grants totaling over $50 million and has published over 200 scientific papers and book chapters on tobacco and nicotine. He has been invited to speak on smoking cessation in over 15 countries. He acts as a consultant to pharmaceutical companies developing smoking cessation products, and has testified to FDA on behalf of the Society for Research on Nicotine and Tobacco on regulation of nicotine replacement therapies. He continues to teach on smoking cessation and conduct research on tobacco and health at Penn State College of Medicine in Hershey, PA. In 2025, along with Jill Williams MD, he published the book “Treating Addiction to Tobacco and Nicotine Products” (American Psychiatric Association Publishing).