Vaping and Lung Health Fact Sheet
TRDRP grantees engage multiple generations in a community engagement activity on the health consequences of vaping
Several eager middle school girls gathered around a table, taking turns testing how deeply they could breathe into a spirometer—a tube-like device that measures how much air you can breathe in and out of your lungs. The goal? To engage girls in learning about the dangers of vaping and smoking from a young age.
Four UCSD undergraduate students and one high school student intern developed and implemented the project under the mentorship of two Tobacco-Related Disease Research Program (TRDRP) grantees and University of California-San Diego (UCSD) professors Ellen Breen and Chantal Darquenne.
Under Breen and Darquenne’s mentorship, the UCSD student team worked for several weeks to develop “The Science of Breathing and Dangers of Vaping” workshop, and then they presented at the March 2025 Expanding Your Horizons (EYH) Conference, which engages middle and high school girls in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) activities. Although EYH attendees included more than 200 girls from grades 6 through 10, the UCSD team decided to target girls at the younger end, to catch them before they start vaping.
“EYH San Diego has been occurring as a conference since 2002 and established as a non-profit organization in 2008,” said Liz Ferguson, EYH’s Executive Director. The organization—and the conference—encourages girls to pursue STEM careers, not to mention the joy of satisfying intellectual curiosity.
Every TRDRP grantee must complete community engagement activities, and for this, Breen and Darquenne gave the reins to the student team—for more reasons than one. Not only did their college student team, potentially the next generation of tobacco control researchers, benefit from their own hands-on learning as they designed, prepared, and then presented to younger kids but having older students teach also had another benefit: it may have helped the younger generation pay closer attention.
“That’s always been my take that when you talk to middle schoolers, the closer in age you are to them, the easier they receive the message,” said Darquenne, a first-time TRDRP grantee. Her lab studies the physics of the inhalation of particles in the lung, and she’s developing refined methods to detect very early lung alterations from the use of vapes.
When the EYH conference day arrived, the UCSD team got to work. Throughout the day, they led three consecutive “rotations,” each lasting around an hour, to different groups of girls. The sessions all filled up, indicating much interest in the topic of vaping.
During each session, each member of the UCSD student team gave a five-minute talk featuring an informative, fun slideshow, asking the younger girls to answer questions as they went through it. “One talked about how lungs work. One talked about the health consequences of smoking or e-cigarette vaping. One of them talked about ventilation and spirometry. And then one talked about the social impacts,” explained Breen, whose TRDRP-funded research focuses on the intersection between COVID, smoking, and skeletal muscle function.
Rose Felicio-Weber, then a high school student working as a Senior Biomedical Student Intern in Breen’s lab, spoke about second and thirdhand smoke, youth addiction, and the high school club she worked with, “Change Comes with Support,” which educates students about these very issues.
“And then we had two or three activities,” Breen said. After the presentation, the 20 or so middle school girls in each session split into groups for different lung health-related activities and rotated among each.
In one activity, the young girls were shown lungs from different species and guessed, ‘Which animal do you think these lungs belong to?’ The display included lungs from a rat, a dog, a rabbit, and an alligator, “so they could get an idea of the huge surface area that your lung has to exchange the gas,” explained Breen. From the earlier presentation, they’d learned that the surface area of human lungs, counting all the internal surface area, is equivalent to a tennis court at around 100 square meters.
In another activity, the UCSD team had built an artificial lung with a large tube entering two other tubes, “to simulate the bifurcation in the lung,” explained Darquenne. The UCSD students then exposed the artificial lung to e-cigarette vapor to show the younger girls how inhaled aerosols (which can include glycol, glycerin, and flavorings) coats the lungs. “They could really appreciate how much of this oily material [vaping] generates, because a lot of them think [it’s] just water.”
In the third station, they had a lung spirometry activity. “Spirometry is a relatively simple test of how well your lungs function,” and is frequently the first test a doctor conducts if anyone has a breathing issue, Darquenne explained. The portable device shows how much air you can breathe in and how fast and forcefully you can exhale, and it was a popular activity. “The student who was in charge of that was saying that they all wanted to do the test, they all wanted to get hands on, they all wanted to see.”
The enthusiasm seen by the kids was satisfying. “The junior high school girls had many questions for my team,” Breen wrote in her TRDRP progress report. Both she and Darquenne plan to participate in EYH again and maybe engage local schools, with some modifications to the activities.
Surprisingly, this topic was new to the EYH conference. “We've not had a workshop on vaping prior to this year,” said Joan Inlow, EYH’s workshop coordinator, but she’d love to see more. “It's important to get the message out about the dangers of vaping, especially for young people.
Community Partnered Research is a priority for TRDRP, and a requirement for all grantees. Bidirectional communication and engagement between researchers and communities affected by commercial tobacco and vaping is critical to effective research and tobacco control programs alike, as California accelerates momentum towards the endgame. In this case, Breen and Darquenne engaged students from middle school, high school, and college in hands-on activities that could really make a difference in the youth’s understanding of vaping. It also provided training for the college students.
Engaging Breen’s high school student intern Felicio-Weber in vaping research had a powerful impact on her. She initially joined her school’s vaping club, Change Comes with Support, to make friends, but ended up accomplishing much more.
“My hope,” says TRDRP Senior Program Officer Ginny Delaney, is that sharing “this innovative idea inspires other TRDRP grantees working in biomedical research to find creative ways to engage with the community and share their research results with Californians.”
Written by Wendee Nicole Holtcamp
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