Announcements

Name: Dr. Monique T. Cano
Affiliations: ¹ Department of Psychiatry, Yale University School of Medicine, New Haven, CT 06511, USA; ² Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, University of California, San Francisco, CA 94143, USA; ³ Institute for International Internet Interventions for Health, Palo Alto University, Palo Alto, CA 94304, USA

“Rethinking Smoking and Quitting in Low-Income Contexts: A Qualitative Analysis with Implications for Practice and Policy”
by Monique T. Cano, Oscar F. Rojas Perez, Sara Reyes, Blanca S. Pineda and Ricardo F. Muñoz
Int. J. Environ. Res. Public Health 2025, 22(7), 1122; https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph22071122

The following is an interview with Dr. Monique T. Cano:

1. Congratulations on your recent publication! Could you briefly introduce yourself and your current research focus?
Of course. My name is Monique Taney Cano. I’m an assistant professor in the Department of Psychiatry at Yale School of Medicine. My research program focuses on adapting and implementing community-informed, health-related interventions for those who experience co-occurring disorders. I incorporate health risk factors into my work and examine their impact on substance use and co-occurring disorders. I also examine and address the physiological and psychological consequences that result from modifiable health risks like substance use.

2. Your research highlights a critical disparity in public health. Could you share what initially sparked your personal interest in this specific area?
Yeah, that’s a really good question. Excellent question. My ethnic and my cultural background, my lived experience along the Texas–Mexico border in the Rio Grande Valley—which is one of the poorest regions in the United States—has really informed my research. As a child, I witnessed health disparities among individuals in my immediate community firsthand. They had limited access to resources and education, which in turn impacted their ability to address threats to their physical and mental health. Witnessing how health disparities impacted and continue to impact my community is really what greatly influenced my decision and my desire to pursue a career that focuses on working with communities that are under-resourced and disproportionately affected by health disparities.

3. What was the single biggest challenge you faced during this study? How did your team overcome it?
I think that one of the biggest challenges our team discussed early on was recruitment. Specifically, how to build trust within the community and effectively engage low-income participants. We knew that we couldn't recruit passively, so we quite literally put on our tennis shoes and went out into the community. We met people where they were, we introduced ourselves, we built connections.
We asked, of course, for permission to share information about the study at various community clinics that we visited, and, at one point, I even joined a Zumba class at a local safety net hospital, not just to be present, but to genuinely connect with community members, and respectfully ask if I could hand out flyers before class started. Then, I just stayed for the class. It was a time-intensive effort that both I and one of the co-authors on the paper, Sarah Reyes, invested a lot of energy into that process, but it was absolutely worth it. I still remember one day, Sarah and I checked our step counters on our watches or our phones, and we had walked 10 miles around San Francisco in a single day of recruitment. So, we worked really hard to get our sample.

4. Based on your current research, what questions do you plan to explore next?
Looking ahead, I'm excited to build on this work by integrating person-centered strategies into behavioral change interventions. So, that might look like including peer support to improve health outcomes and support smoking cessation interventions. I'm also exploring how to support more effective communication between low-income patients and their healthcare providers. I’m helping individuals feel more empowered to ask questions, engage in care, and navigate the healthcare system, and I hope that these future directions really aim to improve long-term outcomes while centering the needs and lived experiences of the communities that I work with.

5. During the process of writing and submitting your paper, what experiences can you share? (For example, how to address reviewer feedback.)
The review process was simple and straightforward, which is something that authors definitely appreciate. I valued the opportunity to respond directly to the reviewers’ comments—so that was like “Reviewer 1”, “Reviewer 2”—and that I could respond directly to each one. This really allowed me and my co-authors to engage thoughtfully with their feedback. In general, my approach to reviewer feedback is to be respectful, open-minded, and thorough. Even after multiple rounds of internal edits with me and my co-authors, reviewers often catch things that we might not have caught or might have missed or offered different perspectives to really strengthen the manuscript. So, I’ve learned to see the review process not necessarily as a hurdle, but as an opportunity to improve clarity, rigor, and the impact of our work.

6. What appealed to you about the journal that made you want to submit your paper? How was your experience submitting to IJERPH?
I had read really high-impact papers from the journal before—papers that are really relevant to my field, my area of interest—and I just really enjoyed reading papers that interested me prior to submitting and it kind of it made me more excited to submit especially, you know, previous colleagues or friends who had submitted to IJERPH before and had really great papers and really great ideas published; this was something that actually excited me about submitting to the journal as well.

We sincerely thank Dr. Monique T. Cano for taking the time to participate in this interview. Her perspectives in the field of health disparities and community-informed interventions have been deeply insightful and inspiring. We wish her continued success and significant impact as she advances her meaningful work in public health and equitable care.