Dr. Caporaso has focused his research on understanding the molecular and population determinants of lung cancer and smoking. To that end, he and his colleagues designed the EAGLE (Environment And Genetics in Lung cancer Etiology) Study, a large, population-based case-control study of lung cancer in Italy, to provide a resource for descriptive, molecular, clinical outcome, and genetic/genomic studies. He incorporated novel behavioral aspects such as nicotine dependency, which has made possible a series of studies involving Time To First Cigarette (TTFC), in which he showed that short TTFC constituted a risk factor for lung cancer and later for COPD. Also, Dr. Caporaso and his colleagues have conducted a series of studies exploring biomarkers (microbiome, cytokines, metabolomics) in relation to smoking and lung cancer and plan to consolidate this work in risk model studies.