Robert Furberg Invited by President’s Cancer Panel to Explore New Media’s Role in Cancer Prevention

RESEARCH TRIANGLE PARK, N.C. — Robert Furberg, Ph.D., senior clinical informaticist at RTI International, has been invited by the President’s Cancer Panel to participate in a workshop to determine the role new media will play in cancer prevention knowledge and practices.

The workshop will launch a series titled “Cancer Communication for Prevention: In the Digital Era, Opportunities amongst the Challenges,” to focus on new media’s potential to improve the national prevention profile by accelerating public knowledge about effective strategies for cancer prevention.

During the next year, workshop participants and panel members will also investigate how new media can be used to increase the number of individuals in the United States who know about and follow recommended cancer prevention practices.

Furberg will join a small group of thought leaders invited by the President’s Cancer Panel on Oct.11, in Bethesda, Md., at the National Institutes of Health. The President’s Cancer Panel is a federal advisory committee whose members are appointed by President Barack Obama. The panel explores topics including cancer prevention and detection that influence government, non-government and industry practices.

At RTI, Furberg conducts future-oriented research on technology-enabled health behavior change. He focuses on understanding how emerging technologies can help individuals adopt and maintain health-enhancing behaviors.

“I’m honored to be a part of this workshop,” Furberg said. “These sessions offer a huge opportunity to explore how individual engagement with new media can be leveraged to enable more effective prevention strategies at the population level.”

Furberg has led the design, clinical implementation, or evaluation of several smartphone and tablet-based applications to support health promotion, primary and secondary disease prevention, and treatment adherence.  He has also studied how the increased engagement of clinicians online can improve health care delivery, health education, patient and family engagement, and clinical decision making.

Currently, Furberg leads a project for the National Institute on Drug Abuse to evaluate existing behavioral approaches for smoking cessation and medication adherence, using text messaging for persons living with HIV/AIDS.
 
He is also piloting a project to use text messages to reduce smoking and increase cessation among American Indian youth and young adult women, in support of the Minority Youth Tobacco Elimination Project.  

Furberg lectures at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Gillings School of Global Public Health and School of Information of Library Science, and the Duke University School of Medicine.

Furberg has a doctorate in medical education and a bachelor’s degree in biology and chemistry from UNC-Chapel Hill, and a bachelor’s degree in emergency medicine from the American College of Prehospital Medicine.