Steven A. Schroeder, M.D. Distinguished Professor of Health and Health Care Director, Smoking Cessation Leadership Center

Dr. Schroeder is Distinguished Professor of Health and Health Care, Division of General Internal Medicine, Department of Medicine, UCSF, where he also heads the Smoking Cessation Leadership Center. The Center, funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the American Legacy Foundation, works with leaders of more than 80 American health professional organizations and health care institutions to increase the cessation rate for smokers. It has expanded the types of clinician groups that support cessation, developed an alternative cessation message (Ask, Advise, Refer), created new ways to market toll-free telephone quit lines, and engaged the mental health treatment community for the first time. Between 1990 and 2002 he was President and CEO, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. During that time the Foundation made grant expenditures of almost $4 billion in pursuit of its mission of improving the health and health care of all Americans. It developed new programs in substance abuse prevention and treatment, care at the end of life, and health insurance expansion for children, among others.

Dr. Schroeder graduated from Stanford University and Harvard Medical School, and trained in internal medicine at the Harvard Medical Service of Boston City Hospital and in epidemiology as an EIS Office of the CDC. He held faculty appointments at Harvard, George Washington, and UCSF. At both George Washington and UCSF he was founding medical director of a university-sponsored HMO, and at UCSF he founded its division of general internal medicine.

He has published extensively in the fields of clinical medicine, health care financing and organization, prevention, public health, the work force, and tobacco control. He currently is a member of the editorial board of the New England Journal of Medicine, a director of the James Irvine Foundation, and the Robina Foundation, and chair of the health care Services Board of the Institute of Medicine. He formerly chaired the American Legacy Foundation, was a Council member of the Institute of Medicine, an Overseer of Harvard, and President, the Harvard Medical Alumni Association. He has six honorary doctoral degrees and numerous awards.

The Smoking Cessation Leadership Center at UCSF was founded in 2003 by a grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The Center works with leaders of health professionals and health care organizations to narrow the gap between what should be done to help smokers quit and what is currently done. It does this through technical assistance and small grants, and its overall goals are to increase the number of smokers who try to quit, to make those quit attempts more successful, to create smoking cessation advocates among health professional leaders, and to expand and stabilize national quitline capability. Because so many health professionals feel they have insufficient time for comprehensive smoking cessation counseling, the Center has created an alternate strategy ("Ask, Advise, Refer") that relies on referrals to toll-free quit lines (1 800 QUIT NOW). To date, the Center has developed relations with more than 20 organizations, and has published extensively in high-profile clinical and lay publications. To learn more about the Center, please visit our web site at http://smokingcessationleadership.ucsf.edu.