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Following the creation of the American Legacy Foundation in 1999, Dr. Cheryl Healton joined the staff as the first president and chief executive officer of this groundbreaking public health nonprofit, created by the historic Master Settlement Agreement between 46 state attorneys general, five U.S. territories and the tobacco industry. Dr. Healton was selected for this important post following a nationwide search and has worked tirelessly to further the foundation’s ambitious mission: to build a world where young people reject tobacco and anyone can quit. During her tenure with the foundation, she has guided the highly acclaimed, national youth tobacco prevention counter-marketing campaign, truth®, that has been credited in part with reducing youth smoking prevalence to its current 28-year low.
Although her current focus is aimed at reducing the deadly toll of tobacco on Americans, Dr. Healton‘s long and dynamic career in the field of public health has earned her national recognition and praise. The recipient of numerous prestigious awards, she has been honored recently with the Social Justice Award from the State of Hawaii and received the American Lung Association’s Life and Breath Award in 2003.
An engaging and outspoken advocate for improving public health, Dr. Healton is a former smoker herself, who lost her own mother and several close family members to tobacco-related disease and provides a unique view of tobacco control issues from a smoker’s perspective. She has a first-hand understanding of addiction and has devoted herself to finding real world solutions to smoking cessation.
Dr. Healton is a thought-provoking public speaker and has given a multitude of presentations around the world. Considered bold, inspirational and humorous, she is a frequent commentator in national and local broadcast and print news coverage regarding tobacco control issues, which include guest appearances on ABC’s Good Morning America; CNN’s Larry King Live; NBC’s Today, MSNBC’s Hardball with Chris Matthews, National Public Radio and more.
She is a wife and mother of three, an author, researcher, professor, and public health administrator with more than 25 years’ experience and has served on a vast array of national, state, and local conferences, committees and task forces for public health and policy issues including HIV/AIDS, violence, and alcoholism. Active in grant support, she has been the principal investigator/program director for more than two-dozen grants and has published numerous articles on public health topics. Dr. Healton is currently writing a book on the topic of women and smoking, with common sense strategies to increase successful quit attempts.
Dr. Healton's understanding of tobacco control issues developed through a series of commitments in recent years. She led grant-funded projects for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to study the effects of marketing and counter-marketing on youth tobacco use; developed a series of prevention partnerships linking public health researchers with New York state tobacco-health policy makers; evaluated intervention programs for the state's largest youth tobacco prevention program; worked at Columbia to bring an interdisciplinary approach to tobacco control and prevention, developing innovative grants which link academic researchers to public health practitioners.
Dr. Healton holds a doctorate from Columbia University's School of Public Health and a master's degree in Public Administration at New York University for health policy and planning. She joined the American Legacy Foundation from Columbia University's Joseph L. Mailman School of Public Health in New York, where she served as Head of the Division of Socio-medical Sciences and Associate Dean for Program Development. She founded and directed the school's Center for Applied Public Health, conceptualizing and implementing applied research in emerging issues in public health including AIDS care for women and children, staffing and burnout at AIDS care organizations, training and development for AIDS care professionals, and computer networking of medical records. Dr. Healton's involvement with Columbia University spans three decades, in which she has served in a variety of administrative faculty roles at the medical center and in public health.
Since joining the foundation, she has continued her relationship with Columbia as a Professor of Clinical Public Health and as an adjunct professor in the School of Nursing and Health Studies at Georgetown University. Dr. Healton lectures widely on a variety of public health topics. | 