Adriana Blanco Marquizo is the Head of the Secretariat of the WHO Framework
Convention on Tobacco Control since March 2020. She is a medical doctor with a
master’s degree in Policies to Prevent Addictions in Children and Adolescents from
the Latin American Centre of Human Economy (CLAEH). Over the past two decades, Dr Blanco Marquizo has worked in the region of the
Americas, supporting tobacco control activities in many countries of the Region,
including her home country, Uruguay. Before joining the Convention Secretariat, Dr Blanco Marquizo worked at the Pan American Health Organization as Tobacco Control Regional Advisor and later as Chief of the Risk Factors and Nutrition Unit in the Department of Noncommunicable Diseases and Mental Health.
Angela Ciobanu is a medical doctor and graduated with a Master’s degree in the Hebrew University-Hadassah Braun School of Public Health and Community Medicine and the Doctoral programs at the State University of Medicine and Pharmacy “Nicolae Testemițanu”, Republic of Moldova. For more than 10 years she worked in the National Center of Public Health of the Republic of Moldova starting as a hygienist in food safety department and later as Secretary of the National Codex Alimentarius Committee. In beginning of 2007 she joints the UNICEF Moldova providing consultancy support in the area of communication for behavior change and later in nutrition. In early 2011 she started working for the WHO CO of the Republic of Moldova as national professional officer coordinating the prevention and control of non-communicable diseases. In the second term of 2018 she moved to Copenhagen, Denmark in the position of technical officer in tobacco control of the WHO Regional Office for Europe where is currently working.
Cristina Martínez is a Senior Researcher expert in Tobacco Control. She is the Deputy Chief at the Tobacco Control Unit and Assistant Professor at the University of Barcelona. She obtained her bachelor’s degree in Nursing Science and Social Anthropology and pursued postgraduate education in Health Policy at the University of California San Francisco (UCSF) where she is an Adjunct Assistant Professor, at the Department of Behavioral Sciences. Dr. Martínez main areas of research include the evaluation of tobacco control policies in health care services, by assessing the impact of smoke-free policies and evaluating the effectiveness of smoking cessation and training programs. She is currently developing online tobacco cessation training programs for health professionals and conducting implementation projects to foster smoking cessation interventions in health care services. Moreover, she is conducting research to assess tobacco use among mentally ill and drug abuse smokers and design cutting-edge interventions to reduce the burden of tobacco-related diseases in this vulnerable population.
Lilia Olefir, the Director of the Smoke Free Partnership (SFP) and the EURO Regional Coordinator for the Global Alliance for Tobacco Control. The SFP Coalition includes over 50 organisations from all over Europe that work on EU policy analysis and advocacy, mobilizing decision makers to make tobacco control a political priority. Prior to joining SFP Lilia worked as Executive Director of Advocacy Centre “LIFE”, SFP Coalition partner. She helped to further build the leadership of “LIFE” in the European and global tobacco control arena. Lilia and Advocacy Center “LIFE” team conducted a successful advocacy tobacco tax campaign in 2017 by supporting the Government in the passage of the 7-year plan to increase specific excise on tobacco products by 20% annually and worked with policy champions on the comprehensive tobacco control bill that became that was adopted in 2021 closing loopholes in tobacco control legislation in Ukraine. SFP Main partners are the Belgian Foundation Against Cancer, Cancer Research UK, the Comité National contre le Tabagisme, the European Heart Network, the Health Funds for a Smokefree Netherlands, and the Norwegian Cancer Society.
Armando Peruga is physician and a doctor in Public Health. He graduated from the Master’s and Doctoral programs of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. In his native Spain, he was the director of the Research Institute on Health and Welfare in Madrid and later became the Dean of the National School of Public Health. In the early 80’s he worked for the Washington DC Commission of Public Health as a behavioral change epidemiologist and began to work with the Pan American Health Organization in 1990. He was the leader of this organization’s tobacco control team until the beginning of 2006, when he moved to Geneva as the coordinator for the capacity building unit of the Tobacco Free Initiative (TFI) of the World Health Organization. He was the program manager for TFI until January of 2016, when he retired from WHO. He is now an associate researcher at the Biomedical Research Institute of Bellvitge (IDIBELL) in Barcelona and the Center for Epidemiology and Health Policy of the Universdad del Desarrollo in Chile.
