Faculty

Background and Expertise:

Dr. Dee Burton is Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Community Health Sciences in the School of Public Health. Dr. Burton received her PhD in Personality and Social Psychology from the New School for Social Research and did her post-doctoral training in health promotion and mass media at the University of Southern California, where she was a National Health Service Award recipient from the National Cancer Institute.  Dr. Burton later served as Associate Professor of Community Health Sciences at the University of Illinois at Chicago School of Public Health.

She comes to SUNY Downstate from the Hunter College Center for Community and Urban Health, where she directed the core on Human Rights, Public Policy and Health. 

Dr. Burton is a nationally recognized expert on tobacco control. She conducted the first randomized trial of tobacco cessation interventions with high-school students.  In other research she developed two models for the mechanisms by which tobacco advertising can lead to the initiation of smoking among youth.  Dr. Burton has twenty-five years of experience working on smoking cessation, including clinically counseling several hundred patients in her earliest work with the Multiple Risk Factor Intervention Trial in New York.

Dr. Burton developed the American Cancer Society’s FreshStart smoking-cessation program and was part of the development group of the American Lung Association’s original Freedom From Smoking program.  She also developed the citywide multimedia “It’s Time” smoking cessation campaign for Chicago.  Her most recent research evaluated an innovative phone-counseling intervention for smoking cessation based on Chinese culture for Chinese restaurant workers in Brooklyn and other New York City boroughs.  Dr. Burton has regularly been supported by extramural funding for her tobacco control research.  She has extensively published on tobacco use cessation and tobacco control in the peer-reviewed scientific literature. 

Dr. Burton is the recipient of a number of awards and honors.  In 1999, she was inducted into the Delta Omega Honorary Society in Public Health.

Courses Taught:

CHSC 7201: Qualitative Research Methods for Public Health Practice

Publications:

Journal Articles 2009-2011

• Burton, D., Graham, J., Johnson, C.A., Uutela, A., Vartiainen, E. & Palmer, R. (2010).  Perceptions of smoking prevalence by youth in countries with and without a tobacco advertising ban. Journal of Health Communication: International Perspectives, 15, 656-664. PMID: 20812125.
• Burton, D., Zeng, X.X., Chiu, C.H., Sun, J., Sze, N.L., Chen, Y. & Chin, M.S. (2010).  A  phone-counseling smoking-cessation intervention for male Chinese restaurant workers. Journal of Community Health, 35(6), 579-585. PMID: 20186474.
• Burton, D., Chakravorty, B., Weeks, K., Flay, B.R., Dent, C., Stacy, A. & Sussman, S. (2009). Outcome of a tobacco-cessation randomized trial with high-school students. Substance Use and Misuse, 44(7), 965-980. PMID: 19938938; PMCID: 2821331.
• Yeh, M., Fahs, M.C., Shelley, D.,Yerneni, R., Parikh, N.S. & Burton, D. (2009).   Body weight and length of residence in the US among  Chinese Americans. Journal of Immigrant & Minority Health, 11, 422-427. PMID:18085438.