Dr. Alisa Padon, PhD in Health Behavior & Society | Research Scientist II at The Public Health Institute

In this episode, we discuss how Alisa’s interest in higher-level influences on our choices and on our health led her to pursue a PhD in Health Behavior and Society at Johns Hopkins, the ways intentionally building a versatile toolkit during her doctoral studies has benefited her career, and the joint roles of research, policy, and advocacy in her current work at The Public Health Institute.

Hosted by Lois Dankwa

To connect with Alisa and to learn more about her story, visit her page on the PHutures #100AlumniVoices Project website.

Transcript

Lois Dankwa

Hi. I'm co-host Lois Dankwa and this is the 100 Alumni Voices Podcast, stories that inspire, where we explore the personal and professional journeys of a diverse group of 100 doctoral alumni from Johns Hopkins University. Today we're joined by Alisa Padon, PhD in health, behavior and society and current research scientist II at the Public Health Institute. Hi, Alisa. 

Alisa Padon

Hi, Lois.

Lois Dankwa

How are you today?

Alisa Padon

I'm doing well, thanks. How are you?

Lois Dankwa

I'm good. I'm excited to dive in and just learn a little about you today. 

Alisa Padon

Great.

Lois Dankwa

So, I want to start by hearing a little bit about what made you want to pursue a PhD in health, behavior and society and just hear a little bit more about your graduate work at Hopkins in general.

Alisa Padon

So, I knew I wanted to get a PhD because I had questions that I wanted to be able to ask and have answered. And I knew I needed PhD level training to do that. As for my focus at Hopkins, I focused on alcohol marketing that appeals to youth and influences underage drinking behaviors. I was and am interested in higher-level influences on our choices and on our health such as marketing, but that includes things like policies and culture and as individuals, we very rarely have power over those environmental factors. But when armed with data and when we work together, that's when we have the best shot at changing them. So that's what I hope to be able to do.

Lois Dankwa

That's so cool. It's it's interesting I mean, I think your project and the stuff you worked on is fascinating, but I'm also curious. So, you said you started, you knew you wanted to get a PhD, and I'm curious then how that affected how you existed in, in the doctorate program in terms of kind of the things you saw yourself learning, but also the vision you had for yourself after being in a doctorate program.

Alisa Padon

Oh my gosh, that's such a good question. So, the main thing for me was to be able to work on the questions that interested me. So, for the first two years of the PhD program, it was a lot of I mean, it's hard work obviously especially stats, but I knew that that was important for me to kind of like fill my toolkit. I had an advisor who said take a methods course every term. And so, I took courses and things I had no idea if I was going to ever use in my career, but I just wanted them in my toolkit, so that was always kind of top of mind for me. And then the content courses were like play time. I would go to one class and like learn something totally new. I did not have a master’s in public health beforehand. I did a masters in bioethics. I did my my BA in psychology. I worked at an IRB, so it was a very different kind of thing. I didn't know about public health theories, and so a lot of it was brand new for me and I’d go into one class and learn about a theory and then go into another class and be like oh my god, I get how this connects. And what about this idea and that idea? So, it was really a rich intellectual experience for me. So, I got to play and also do the work to, you know, build up that resume and my sort of methods training all at the same time. So, I guess I, I I didn't know what kind of job I was necessarily interested in outside of the PhD. I think there were I figured there were lots of different kind of roles I thought I could I could explore my interest in, you know, including academia, government, and nonprofit institutions. It really came down to like how do I get to study what I want to study?

Lois Dankwa

Yeah, I can certainly identify with a lot of the parts that you said from being a BA in psychology to just being naturally curious and wanting to study what you wanted to study. And I'm I'm curious then kind of from the the guidance you were receiving closer to the end of your doctorate work what what helped you kind of pick your first step?

Alisa Padon

It was talking to my network. It was figuring out where, if not exactly, alcohol marketing, what might be a close corollary that would use the skill set I've developed but expand on it. I was interested in alcohol specifically because it's got this long history in humanity. You know, it used to be kind of the only thing that was safe to drink when water wasn't to be trusted, and it holds this place for us in celebrations and in, you know, social like socializing. We are social creatures. So, alcohol was inherently interesting to me, but I became more knowledgeable about just the field of substance use. And so, I thought, OK, I could go on and study, I could study tobacco; I could study soda. I could study, you know, basically consumable products. And then I learned about this postdoc at the University of Pennsylvania, where they had a TCoRS or tobacco center in regulatory science, and went and talked to them about my work on alcohol marketing and youth, and this was at the time when and Jewel was advertising heavily and everyone was like, this looks pretty youth appealing. Like, what are we doing about this? And I realized what I had done at Hopkins could apply really nicely to that area. So, yeah, I think those are kind of the parameters in which I was looking and and I think also being OK with, like letting go of some of the things I had developed, such a deep expertise on like alcohol and seeing how I could apply it somewhere else.

Lois Dankwa

That's it's cool to hear how you you noticed your interest was maybe broader than the specific topic that you'd focused on more narrowly in the beginning, but I I'm curious how so earlier you mentioned that a lot of your doctorate was spent collecting tools. And different things that might have been a challenge at first to collect. But you were like, OK, well, I'm gonna develop my toolkit now. And you had kind of the play field where you took content classes. And I'm curious how kind of those things that you gathered and you became equipped with in your doctorate program helped you feel prepared in this new moment where you weren't necessarily focused on the same topic anymore.

Alisa Padon

So, for my doctoral work, I did something of a mixed methods analysis. I took survey data on adolescents and adults reporting the kinds of alcohol brands that they preferred. I collected market level data, so where alcohol advertisements were aired and then I developed this index to to measure the appeal of these ads. That index was developed from a literature review. OK, so I've got survey analysis, literature review, content analysis and then triangulating those three steps through what's essentially a cross-sectional analysis using multivariate linear regression. When I went to my postdoc, I wanted to adapt this index for E cigarettes, so I did a randomized controlled trial to basically say, OK, well, what kinds of content are should I should I be thinking about including in this index when we apply it to E cigarettes? So that was a whole new method for me. It was still an RCT, a randomized control trial within a survey. So, in that respect, I was, you know, using some of the same tools I'd used before, but now doing it in a new way. I would say another way that that training benefited me was now at this TCoRS We had these lab meetings every week. A PhD can be quite an isolating process as I think you know. You kind of work on this dissertation, which is just your idea. You've got maybe if you're lucky a weekly meeting with your advisor. But otherwise, you're doing it very much on your own. So, at the postdoc we had these weekly team meetings, and I was part of two teams where we sat down and gave updates on our projects and heard updates from others and gave advice you know or talked through issues. And so that toolkit I had also came into play in supporting my colleagues and you know, giving ideas about things I had learned, and then, you know, you have these, like, wonderfully collaborative relationships where you also get to be involved in other people's projects and you get to help them with analysis and maybe be on a paper. And so, it not only benefited my own work, but it also helped me develop these relationships and deepen them and learn about other content areas people were working on and begin to build out my network. If that makes sense.

Lois Dankwa

Yeah, that definitely makes sense. It's cool to hear how you were able to very like immediately after, just use all the tools that you've collected and get to experience what it was like to be the person kind of filling the gap in a team in a certain way.

Alisa Padon

Yeah. It is a really cool experience. I this is sort of a different question, but when I was considering academia, one of the concerns I had was this something I'd heard that is, you’re kind of an island, you know, in academia, you often are sort of working on your own, but as part of the TCORS anyway, it it didn't feel like that at all. You know, you always had the support of team around you and you know, right next door was someone else who was really smart, who you could pop in and and brainstorm with and talk through ideas with. And that was really nice.

Lois Dankwa

Right. It's it's an island, but you're not the only person that's on the island. You just have to wander a bit to find the other people with you. 

Alisa Padon

Exactly.

Alisa Padon

So, I'm curious then I'm curious to hear more about kind of the like where you are now and like what got you to this moment. But then how you're seeing some of the stuff you might have learned in the past, or skills that you practiced and the exercise, like the muscles that you exercised, how those led to the moment that we're in now for you?

Alisa Padon

So, I am now a research scientist at the Public Health Institute. I think I just saw a posting like on APHA’s newsletter or something, but I knew I wanted to move out to the Bay Area because my husband's work was leading him out here and so it was kind of like, alright, how how lucky am I going to get trying to find something that's a fit for me? And at the time it was just this one person, Doctor Lynn Silver, who had secured an R1 to study the impact of the San Francisco Soda warning label Law, which is the first of its kind in the US and that was that, seemed to me like great, another consumable product, it's Health Communication, it's it's a policy level, which I had not really gotten into in the past, but it was still one of those sort of upper-level influences on our behaviors and on our health that you know was within the framework of things I really wanted to study. So, I joined this person; it wasn't even a team at the time. We were a team of two. That law got held up in the courts because, you know, soda industry did not want to put a warning label on their ads. So, we ended up pivoting to studying the soda tax, which had also just been passed in San Francisco. That was new for me. It was still sort of survey methods, but something I you know was familiar with. And then we did this environmental scan. I'm kind of getting ahead of myself. We did an environmental scan of advertisements in San Francisco as a baseline when we thought the bill was still going to pass for the warning label law, we went around and took pictures of as inside of stores at at point of purchase to see how they might change, what the compliance would be after the law went into effect, you know, with industry actually putting these warning labels up on them and all that. So that was a brand-new method. Anyway, long story short, we never got to use any of that. We did this sort of tax that was a four-year project. We finally just got our publication out from that project. But in the meantime, this was 2016 and Prop 64, which was the law that passed adult use cannabis sales in California had also just been passed, so we expanded our scope to study cannabis laws. Six years later now we are a team of nine people. We have several grants studying these kind of public health focused policies. In the meantime, I have learned so much about local law and process and policy. I got to take excerpts from my dissertation on alcohol marketing and its appeal to youth adapt them for cannabis and now they are in like local municipal codes in California. It's very satisfying work.

Lois Dankwa

That's so cool. That's amazing.

Alisa Padon

You have this balance between the research and the advocacy part. So, you know when you're in just academia, you do research, you write a paper, you hope somebody reads it. If you're really on top of it, you have like a communications team and you can put out a press release and you know, hopefully expand your coverage a little bit. But this was a whole new kind of area for me to get to talk to local policymakers and say, here's what we know from the research on what kinds of marketing are appealing to youth. Here's what we recommend you right into your law at the very like the birth of this brand-new sort of market. Anyway, I it was, it's. It was and continues to be a very satisfying place to work.

Lois Dankwa

That's so cool. I I feel like you have. So, my brain is exploding cause I you said so many really cool things. But I can see a lot of people people identifying with kind of how your career has looked or wanting their career to look similar to how you've been able to experience it, where you've been able to tie in an interest in health communication, health advocacy, research and policy and being a part of all of those different pieces and different ways. And I'm curious how you balance kind of the challenge of doing kind of interdisciplinary work, but then also how you've been able to kind of gain some ability to do it or do it well and navigate the different spaces?

Alisa Padon

Yeah. So, I would say impostor syndrome is real. Everyone has it. I had to work through that a lot. In my early days with PHI Public Health Institute we would go to City Council meetings and board of supervisor meetings and like state meetings where we were going to give comments on proposed bills. And the room would be like 90% industry stakeholders and us and like my heart would just be pounding as I would like, walk up to the podium during the public comment time and read this you know you have like 2-minute Max usually like very brief thing I prepared to say, like, here's what my research has shown on this thing. I recommend you do this and it's in direct contradiction to what you know, most of the people in the room want because they're in the industry and their interest is fewer regulations and I get it, but also like it's important to balance that if you're going to legalize, there's a way to do it in there's a way to do it that protects youth and public health, and I'm talking specifically about cannabis right now. But so that was a whole new kind of skill set for me to do that kind of public speaking. You know, it's very different from going to a conference and you know doing going through a PowerPoint slide of your methodology and your results. And so that, yeah, that was something I had to kind of become OK with. Then as our team expanded, we just made sure to have really open conversations about what we wanted. What each of us wanted to do on our day-to-day. What most took advantage of our skills and interest in all that, and so at this point now I am the research director for the team and so I meet with you know everybody and do our own research. But, other people get to go to the City Council meeting, so I don't have to have anxiety attacks, so I'm very lucky I've gotten to have that experience, but also be part of a team that now has enough enough sort of depth that I don't have to do that regularly. But it was a good experience nonetheless. Don't know if that answers your question, but.

Lois Dankwa

Yeah, no it does. It does definitely answer my question. Where it’s you you got to practice the thing that was different. And yes, it was uncomfortable. But you you got to learn along the way. But then handed the value of being in the team afford to do the opportunity to balance out the strengths where it was like, OK, well, now once you move on to a different moment, you can redirect those efforts to someone else if it's not your favorite thing.

Alisa Padon

Exactly. And the the other side of that, I think is, I also got the chance to be a manager, which isn't something I knew if I wanted to do and was hard and definitely like you have to kind of develop new skills. But I learned that I actually really like being a manager, so that's something where, you know, I had to practice this thing and came out the other side going I would like to do this more. And so yeah, that's another nice thing that happens, can happen.

Lois Dankwa

So, I'm curious then if, this is a bit of a two-part question. So, if there's like 1 standout lesson that you've learned in your career so far that you think is something that would be valuable for people to just learn at some point in their career, but then also this I guess goes within a larger question of just what advice would you give to someone who's interested in a career that looks like yours?

Alisa Padon

So, I would say who you are working for and with can be as important as the role that you're in. I think that's especially true early in your career. Seek out chances to learn from great leaders and bosses. It may be worth taking a less desirable role with a better boss than a super flashy role with unsupportive leadership. I mean, I we haven't talked about this, but I also have three kids. I had my first kid during my postdoc, and I had my third one last summer. And over the years, I have solicited and received great advice from other professionals about work life harmony. I won't call it balanced because it's not always 50/50 and not not that it should be. It depends on the person. But one advice that I got which I thought was really good when you're planning to do have a big life change or you're trying to figure that out, whether it's changing jobs or having a baby, but at the end of the day, life makes room and related to that, another tip that I loved was that the most important career decision you'll ever make is who you marry. Or if you marry. You know, I could not have accomplished what I have without the support I've received from my partner and we both have careers and they are seen by us as equally valuable and important. And we also share three kids. So, we have lots of conversations about mental and emotional labor in our home and make sure that, you know, we're keeping that open communication and doing our best to support each other as whole people.

Lois Dankwa

Yeah, that's great that's great to hear. So, I have one more question for you and I'm curious what inspires you right now?

Alisa Padon

Oh yeah, it's such a great question. I I my kids inspire me. I mean, as somebody interested in the many layers of influence on us and with a history in cognitive development and psychology, I get to watch their brains develop and their identities form, like, right in front of me. And they teach me a lot about myself as well. I want them to grow up as I did with an example of a mom who is her own person and all of that entails as well as their mom and also to see a dad who contributes to the house just as much as I do. You know, I think we're kind of I hope we're entering this new era where family life looks very different and that's OK. And yes, there's going to be some hurdles to get through. But I think we will, and I don't know, one of the best things maybe I can do in my life besides what I'm learning and the policies I'm shaping is the people that I'm shaping, you know, in my own family, so hopefully I'll I can put as much effort and thought and and care into that as I do in my career.

Lois Dankwa

I love that and it's been such a pleasure to chat with you today, Alisa. I've loved learning about you, hearing some of your experiences and kind of about the things that have brought you to this moment.

Alisa Padon

Thanks, Lois. it's been great talking to you.