Dr. Anna Song is an Associate Professor of Health Psychology at UC Merced. She is also the Director of UC Merced’s Nicotine and Cannabis Policy Center, funded by a $3.8 million award from the Tobacco-Related Disease Research Program.
Dr. Song and her lab currently conducts research that helps to identify and address psychosocial factors that increase health risk behaviors that lead to heart and cardiovascular disease, cancer, and obesity. These behaviors include tobacco, marijuana, and e-cigarette use, sedentary lifestyles, and dietary choices. Factors of interest include perceptions of risks/benefits, social norms, implicit biases, policies, and media exposure. Community engagement serves as the foundation to her research. Her work ranges from development of qualitative methodologies to statistical modeling of large-scale, longitudinal data.
A Michigan native, Dr. Song earned her BA in psychology and political science at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. She moved to California’s Central Valley in 1999 to enter the doctoral program at UC Davis. She received her PhD in personality psychology at UC Davis in 2006. From there, she became a postdoctoral fellow at the University of California, San Francisco Center for Tobacco Control Research and Education. She joined the UC Merced faculty in 2008 and has been committed to Valley health ever since.