About Eric Leas

Dr. Eric Leas is a Stanford, UCLA, and UC San Diego trained Assistant Professor at the Herbert Wertheim School of Public Health and Human Longevity Science in the UC San Diego School of Medicine.

For the past half decade, Dr. Leas has studied the social and health implications of legal substance use including cannabis and tobacco. He is currently funded as a Principal Investigator by the US Food and Drug Administration and the National Institute on Drug Abuse and as a Co-Investigator by the National Cancer Institute and the California Tobacco Related Disease Research Program.

Dr. Leas is among the first generation of scientists to come of age in the "Big Data" era, which encompasses many novel data sources including social networks, electronic medical records, and social media. Together with Drs. Alicia Nobles, Ben Althouse, John Ayers, Mark Dredze and many others he has developed methodologies to analyze these data sources to answer research questions that in many cases have never been addressable before.