Caitlin Weiger, PhD

Caitlin Weiger, M.H.S., Ph.D., is an Assistant Professor in the Division of Nursing Science at the Rutgers School of Nursing and a member of the Rutgers Institute for Nicotine and Tobacco Studies. She received her Master of Health Science and Ph.D. in Social and Behavioral Sciences from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, and completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the Rutgers Institute for Nicotine and Tobacco Studies, where she was mentored by Drs. Olivia Wackowski, Julia Chen-Sankey, and Michelle Jeong.

Research Interests

Dr. Weiger is a social and behavioral scientist whose research focuses on nicotine and tobacco communication. She combines surveys, interviews, randomized message experiments, and communication neuroscience methods (including attentional and affective measures of message response) to understand how people react to health communication and to predict subsequent behavior. She has used this multimethod approach to characterize responses to existing and novel video messaging about the relative harms of e-cigarettes among adults who smoke cigarettes, with the goal of designing effective harm reduction communication for this population.

Her research also examines the beliefs underlying public perceptions of nicotine and tobacco products, including misperceptions about nicotine’s role in cancer, and how these beliefs can be corrected through messaging. Additional work explores associations between sociodemographic characteristics, risk perceptions, and exposure to tobacco marketing and public health communication, including evaluations of FDA campaigns and court-ordered corrective statements at the point of sale. Collectively, her work aims to inform tobacco regulatory science and public health communication strategy.