A new five-year University of California, Irvine study will use researchers with a variety of backgrounds to try and determine why teens are more likely to start smoking than adults.

The $70 million project is the largest smoking project ever funded by the National Institutes of Health, and will involve seven research centers around the United States. Experts in psychology, economics, biochemistry, among other disciplines, will look at a different aspect of teen smoking. The approach is a novel one, and a researcher will be studying the group of researchers to see whether interdisciplinary studies are more effective than independent ones. "What we've seen here and at other centers around the country is that it takes time to develop a common understanding," said Dan Stokols, a social ecology professor who will be studying the group. "It's pretty rare to get biologists and social psychologists to sit down together and try to study the same problem. This really hasn't been done before."

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