Our Team

Lisa Marshall served as a Health Educator with Ramsey County Public Health Environmental Health Division, retiring in 2020. While there, she has provided liaison for 15 years between the Ramsey Tobacco Coalition and the Saint Paul-Ramsey County Department of Public Health. In addition to her work on tobacco, she organized educational programs for adults and children on nutrition and food recycling, coordinated the ServSafe program, educated on Radon and managed community grants. She received her B.S. from Mansfield University and her M.S. from City University of New York.

Gene brings with him more than 35 years of health care work experience from J&J Healthcare and the Health Care Division of 3M Corporation, now retired. Gene is Board Chair at Rainbow Research and the past Board Chair of Open Cities Health Clinic, a Federally Qualified Health Center in St. Paul. Gene is a Human Right Commissioner for the City of Shoreview Minnesota where he resides and is a member of the MDH Maternal and Child Health Task Force. He currently serves as Community Specialist at Association for Non Smokers MN (ANSR).

Thomas Phetmeuangmay grew up in rural Illinois and achieved two Undergraduate degrees in Anthropology and Political Science with a in MPA in local government administration. Throughout his life and educational career he knew he had a passion for giving back to the community and helping its members improve their quality of life. Smoking has been a major issue within his family on both his Irish and Lao sides and has taken a proactive step in trying to make the issue vanish within his lifetime. Following his graduation, he heard of an opportunity to be the Tobacco Awareness Program Manager for the Lao Center of Minnesota and both of his dream combined for a perfect dream job. He is currently expanding the resources available to the Lao and Khmer community, creating language-focused materials to be distributed to the elder community, and creating programs so that Community Health Liaisons can continue the work in their own respective communities.

Martha Hewett is the Director of Research at Center for Energy and Environment where she has worked in energy efficiency and indoor air quality since 1983. Her work related to secondhand smoke in multifamily buildings includes (a) survey, legal and technical research on secondhand smoke transfer in rental buildings, (b) monitoring of SHS particles and gases in a stratified random sample of rental apartments and (c) survey research on secondhand smoke transfer in multi-unit condominium buildings. She also managed monitoring of secondhand smoke particles in a large sample of bars & restaurants in Minnesota. All of these projects were funded directly or indirectly by ClearWay Minnesota. She has conducted surveys and engineering research on the design of hospital operating rooms and airborne infection isolation rooms for infection control with funding from the National Institutes of Standards and Technology and chaired development of the Indoor Air Quality Guide developed by the American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air Conditioning Engineers (ASHRAE) with funding from the U. S. Environmental Protection Agency.

Esha Seth is a former employee of the Association for Nonsmokers-Minnesota and has almost 10 years of experience working with community engagement, advocacy, and technical assistance. Esha has a Masters in Public Health from the University of Minnesota and has worked alongside several community organizations and public health departments to implement and enforce tobacco-free policies for grounds, parks, and at the point of sale. Esha worked with Isanti County to increase their age of sales from 18 to 21 in 2019 that helped the state pass the Tobacco 21 law in August 2020. Esha also worked with the City of Saint Paul to pass their innovative Price Discounting policy that has now been replicated in the city of Minneapolis. Esha currently serves as the Program Administrator in the Division of Energy Resources at the Minnesota Department of Commerce.

Dr. Joseph currently holds the Wexler Professorship of Medicine. She is Vice-Chair for Faculty Affairs and Diversity for the Department of Medicine. This office leads the mentoring programs for approximately 120 junior faculty in this Department. She directs the Applied Clinical Research Program in the Department of Medicine to support faculty development in clinical research. The program provides a second level of mentorship for young faculty, with particular attention to career development issues specific to women and minorities. Her primary research interest is reducing harm from tobacco use. She has conducted randomized controlled trials in clinical and health services research, principally funded by the NIH and VA Health Services Research and Development for over 25 years. The studies have included topics of common public health concern including use of nicotine replacement therapy in smokers with heart disease; concurrent treatment of alcohol and nicotine dependence and promotion of evidence-based tobacco dependence treatment to population-based samples of smokers; and using novel telephone, proactive outreach and longitudinal care interventions to reach smokers. The research team, including Steve Fu, is particularly interested in how proactive outreach might overcome disparities in access to tobacco treatment. She co-leads the Prevention and Etiology Program at the University of Minnesota Comprehensive Cancer Center.

Iman Ibrahim is a junior at Eagan High School and a freshman at Inver Hills Community College. She is actively involved in advocacy work, co-founding the Tobacco-Free Society in her freshman year to prevent youth access to flavored tobacco products and to improve communities affected by industry marketing and health disparities. Outside of school, she has hosted vaping prevention workshops in local middle schools, serves on her district’s Legislative Advisory Council, and as a Policy Lead on the Governor’s Young Women’s Initiative Cabinet. After graduation, she aspires to go to college to study public policy or public health.