Dr. Mock conducts collaborative action research examining how people’s cultural context shapes their patterns of tobacco, nicotine and cannabis use. As a health anthropologist, for over two decades, Dr. Mock has focused on examining how and why people’s lived experience of tobacco use and secondhand smoke exposure is deeply rooted in culture. His research explores how cultural and political-economic change can influence tobacco use within a cultural group. His work has recently expanded into examining the cultural phenomena of young people’s use of e-cigarettes, heated tobacco products, oral nicotine products, and cannabis products. He is now working on the tobacco/nicotine endgame in California.

Currently, Dr. Mock is the principal investigator on a participatory study documenting e-cigarette waste contamination at high schools and heated tobacco product waste at parks and recreational areas in Japan and California. In this study, his colleagues are conducting ecotoxicological analyses of waste items collected.

Dr. Mock was the principal investigator on a four-year study in California, Japan and Thailand focused on generating evidence to support the denormalization of smoking and vaping in the great outdoors. Through the analysis of tobacco industry documents and tobacco advertising, Dr. Mock and his collaborators identified strategies that tobacco companies have used to propagate the use of their products in outdoor settings. At parks and beaches throughout California, Japan and Thailand, Dr. Mock and his team conducted observations and collected discarded waste from the use of combustible tobacco, e-cigarettes, heated tobacco products, oral nicotine products and cannabis. The goal of this study was to document the environmental impacts and nuisance of smoking and vaping in outdoor recreational areas, marine ecosystems and wilderness habitats.

Dr. Mock led the first-of-its-kind garbology study on how teen “juuling” and use of cigarettes, cigarillos, and cannabis were polluting high school environments. His publications also include the first study to document high levels of secondhand smoke exposure at popular beaches, and one of the first studies showing that beaches are heavily polluted from tobacco waste. He has also published research on the burden of secondhand smoke exposure on the respiratory health of Thai children, tobacco company interference in Thailand, waterpipe use in Syria, and smoking patterns among Southeast Asian refugee and immigrant communities in the U.S.

Dr. Mock teaches courses on health promotion planning and evaluation, public health research methods, and intercultural communication. He has conducted trainings on health anthropology and evaluation research for the Ministries of Public Health in Thailand, Cambodia and Laos, and partnered with the Osaka Prefecture Department of Public Health and at the WHO Kobe Health Development Research Center.