Cancer Prevention Fellow
Organization:
Office of the Associate Director (OAD)
Emma Jesch, PhD, MPH is a Cancer Prevention Fellow in the Office of the Associate Director of the Behavioral Research Program.
Her research focuses on health communication related to cancer prevention, tobacco control, and most recently, COVID-19 – spanning routine media exposure and campaign development. Her dissertation work looked at the effects of conflicting health information: how might ongoing exposure to contradictory messages (is red wine really good for you, or not?) impact receptivity to health campaigns?
Emma received her PhD in communication from the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania in 2023, and her MPH in quantitative methods at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health in 2024. Prior to graduate school, she was a research associate at Cornell University, where she facilitated data collection aboard a mobile eye-tracking lab. She also received her BS in communication from Cornell in 2016.
Scientific Interests
- Health communication
- Conflicting or uncertain health information
- Media effects
- Campaign development
- Decision making
Selected Publications and Presentations
- Payne JB, Rohde JA, Garrido CO, Jesch E, Klein WMP, Berrigan D, Moser RP, Han PKJ. Warning label messages about the cancer risk associated with alcohol: Effects of causal language. Addict Behav. 2025 Aug 12;170:108453. doi: 10.1016/j.addbeh.2025.108453. Epub ahead of print. PMID: 40829293.
- Jesch E, Kikut AI, Hornik R. Comparing belief in short-term versus long-term consequences of smoking and vaping as predictors of non-use in a 3-year nationally representative survey study of US youth. Tob Control 2023 Jul; 32(4):435-442.
- Hornik R, Binns S, Emery S, Epstein VM, Jeong M, Kim K, Kim Y, Kranzler EC, Jesch E, Lee SJ, Levin AV, Liu J, O'Donnell MB, Siegel L, Tran H, Williams S, Yang Q, Gibson LA. The Effects of Tobacco Coverage in the Public Communication Environment on Young People's Decisions to Smoke Combustible Cigarettes. J Commun 2022 Jan 13; 72(2):187-213.
- Jesch E, Niederdeppe J, King AJ, Safi AG, Byrne S. "I Quit": Testing the Added Value and Sequencing Effects of an Efficacy-focused Message among Cigarette Warning Labels. J Health Commun 2020 May 3; 25(5):361-373.
- Greiner Safi A, Reyes C, Jesch E, Steinhardt J, Niederdeppe J, Skurka C, Kalaji M, Scolere L, Byrne S. Comparing in person and internet methods to recruit low-SES populations for tobacco control policy research. Soc Sci Med 2019 Dec; 242:112597.
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