Louisa Holmes, PhD is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Center for Tobacco Control Research & Education (CTCRE) at UCSF. She is currently developing a population-based survey of young adults (18-26) in the San Francisco Bay Area designed to assess prevalence of tobacco use and detect tobacco-related health disparities by race/ethnicity. Louisa obtained her Ph.D. in Geography from University of Southern California (USC) and previously attended graduate school in Public Policy at University of Massachusetts Boston. Her research interests are interdisciplinary, and she has additional training in Demography, Social Epidemiology and Behavioral Health. In her graduate career, Louisa managed three community-based probabilistic household surveys of foreign-born 1) Brazilians and 2) Dominicans in metropolitan Boston (BM-IHLSS) and 3) Mexicans in Los Angeles County (LAC-MIHLSS), funded by NCI and CDC respectively. These studies collected information on legal status, social environments, socioeconomic status and self-reported and biological health from understudied populations. She also organized spatial data collection on health and recovery in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina and has consulted on several other biodemographic and geospatial health research projects in Los Angeles, San Diego, Houston and Missouri. Louisa has a particular interest in stress, health and neighborhoods. Her dissertation research used the BM-IHLSS data to study behavioral (smoking), physiological (C-reactive protein) and psychological (distress) stress as a function of neighborhood characteristics and unauthorized legal status among Brazilian migrants.

Louisa is a member of the tobacco cessation research project team within CHARM.