Lung Lectures

Lung Lectures are delivered by trained student volunteers, often alongside a supervising clinician or research mentor, to middle schools, high schools, and community organizations. Each talk is built around real respiratory physiology — how the lungs develop, what smoking and vaping do to that process, and how early screening changes outcomes.

We tailor content to the audience: a middle-school assembly and a community health night run differently, but both start from the same evidence base our screening and research teams use.

We've already brought this program to Pasadena High School, where we've returned multiple times to keep the conversation going with the same student population — not a one-off assembly, but an ongoing relationship built visit by visit.

Our flagship talk, Love Your Lungs, was developed by our UCLA chapter in partnership with UCLA Health and Cedars-Sinai. It's the deck most other chapters start from before adapting it for their own school.

What a talk actually covers

Why lung disease and tobacco use remain the leading preventable killers in the U.S. · how the lungs move oxygen into your blood, down to the alveoli · how nicotine hijacks the brain's reward system in seconds and rewires it to crave more · how smoking and vaping disable the cilia, the lungs' own cleaning system · what a nicotine habit actually costs, in dollars and in symptoms · why teenage lungs and brains are still developing, and what that means for how much damage sticks.