Yang Tingzhong is a scholar in social medicine, a behaviorist and sociologist.
Biography
Dr. Yang was born in Guyuan, a village in the Ningxia Muslim Hui Autonomous Region, an area which blends Muslim culture with that of the Han Chinese. This background, combined with traumatic experiences in the Great Famine during Maozedong's Cultural Revolution, made him cognizant of distinctive patterns of health behaviors under this culture norms. In turn, this laid the foundation for the main focus of his career, tobacco control. Smoking in the People's Republic of China represents an enormous public health problem. Many Chinese universities are developing training programs for medical students to improve capacity for tobacco control advocacy. Since 2007, Yang has been directing the first program aiming at promoting all forms of tobacco control in Chinese universities. Projects comprising this program are sponsored by the Bloomberg Initiative to Reduce Tobacco Use. The first goal of the project is to conduct tobacco control advocacy capacity training among medical students and the second goal is ban smoking on university campuses nationwide. Currently, the project currently covers all provinces, municipalities, and autonomous regions in China which involves nearly 100 universities from more than 70 cities. A total of about 150,000 medical students capable of tobacco control advocacy had been trained through this project. All participating universities have adopted smoking-free campus policies, with a third of them expected to achieve the goals set by the project. The outcomes of this research project have been reported by the WHO, selected in the University's Research Highlights at the 120th anniversary of Zhejiang University, and was introduced under the title of "Using Cultural Understanding to Stub out Killer Habit" in Nature. Yang is a leader in this initiative, and produces numerous publications in major journals with many international collaborators. Several papers were cited by WHO report on the global tobacco epidemic, and other official documents. Core information of "Global Health Professions Student Survey in Tobacco Control in China "was released by the United Nations. Yang graduated from Shanxi Medicine University in 1982. He was appraised as an outstanding contributing scientist by the government of Jiangsu Province in 1994. Yang served as Assistant Research Scientist at the University of California, San Diego from 1998 to 2000. He is a full professor in the Department of Social Medicine at Zhejiang University.
