Dr. Heather Platter, the Horowitz Center’s 2018-2019 Rudd Health Literacy Fellow and a Center Research Assistant, successfully defended her dissertation in May 2019. Her dissertation explored health literacy and informed decision-making about lung cancer screening among older adults with long-term smoking, which resulted in a health literacy theoretical model on informed decision-making about lung cancer screening.
Currently, she is a Cancer Prevention Fellow at the National Cancer Institute and focuses on tobacco control and prevention, early detection, and cancer prevention.
Her research interests include communication in healthcare systems and patient-provider relationships, such as shared decision-making in cancer screening and tobacco use discussions. She is also interested in the influence of affective factors on decision-making, how cancer and tobacco misinformation affect patient health outcomes, and how individuals find, process, evaluate, and respond to cancer risk information.