Dr. Carter-Harris is an Associate Attending Behavioral Scientist, and the Associate Research Director of the Tobacco Research, Treatment & Training Lab in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. Broadly, her program of research focuses on helping patients and their clinicians have more effective discussions, with the goal of improving patient decision-making. She has a passion for working with patients who have been diagnosed with, or who are at high risk for, the development of tobacco-related cancers. In addition to her work focused on communication and decision-making, Dr. Carter-Harris' research also aims to decrease the stigma associated with tobacco-related cancers and to decrease health disparities among cancer patients and individuals at risk for tobacco-related cancers. Dr. Carter-Harris first became interested in the field of lung cancer after a health policy practicum during her doctoral studies, in which she had the opportunity to attend a health policy workshop on Capitol Hill. She heard the many stories of lung cancer survivors and caregivers and saw the social injustice that lung cancer patients experienced secondary to lung cancer-related stigma. That ignited a passion for early detection and decreasing lung cancer stigma that has permeated every study she has conducted.

Dr. Carter-Harris' program of research has provided many foundational components of understanding lung cancer screening behavior from the patient perspective, including conceptual model development, development of instruments to measure lung cancer screening health beliefs, and designing and testing interventions to promote shared decision-making in this complex cancer screening decision. She recently conducted a mixed methods study to test her conceptual model on lung cancer screening behavior from the perspective of the patient, supported by an R15 funded by the National Cancer Institute (R15 CA208543). She is currently leading a mixed methods study to understand the "active ingredients," so to speak, of shared decision-making in the context of lung cancer screening (R01 CA222090). Using multi-level clinician and patient data, she is examining predictors of positive decisional and behavioral outcomes in lung cancer screening-eligible patients. The results of this study will allow her team to tailor and target decision support interventions that are meaningful and effective in the context of lung cancer screening and ultimately translate to a variety of shared decisions in healthcare between patients and their clinicians.