Kay Wanke Ph.D., M.P.H. joined the ODP in March 2013 as the Deputy Director of the Tobacco Regulatory Science Program (TRSP), which coordinates the trans-NIH collaborative effort with the FDA’s Center for Tobacco Products (CTP) to foster tobacco regulatory research. She first began assisting the FDA CTP in establishing their research programs while working as a program officer at the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) in the Epidemiology Research Branch. There, she co-led the development of the program for the Tobacco Centers of Regulatory Science and helped coordinate CTP’s collaborative efforts across the NIH Institutes.

At NIDA, Dr. Wanke’s portfolio of grants covered the areas of tobacco control, tobacco regulatory science, genetic and behavioral epidemiology, and novel and improved phenotypes of tobacco and other drugs of abuse. She also previously served as a Health Scientist Administrator in the NIH Office of Behavioral and Social Sciences Research, where she developed programs to foster and support research in behavioral and social science genetics.

Dr. Wanke received her Ph.D. in clinical psychology from Southern Illinois University at Carbondale and completed her pre-doctoral internship at the University of Alabama at Birmingham School of Medicine. Her training and clinical experience include child psychology, forensic psychology, substance abuse, serious mental illness, marriage and family therapy, and developmental and neuropsychological assessment. She initially came to the NIH in 2001 as a Cancer Prevention Fellow at the National Cancer Institute. While in that fellowship, she completed her M.P.H. at the Harvard School of Public Health and conducted research in tobacco use and depression, factors associated with adherence, strategies to improve smoking phenotype definition, and behavioral genetics of smoking cessation.