Dr. Alan Blum is a family physician and a professor in the Department of Family, Internal, and Rural Medicine at the College of Community Health Sciences. He is the first holder of the Gerald Leon Wallace, M.D., Endowed Chair in Family Medicine at CCHS. One of the foremost authorities on tobacco issues, Blum is the director of The University of Alabama Center for the Study of Tobacco and Society, which he established in 1999.
Blum graduated from Amherst College in Amherst, Mass., with a BA in English literature. He earned his MD at Emory University School of Medicine in Atlanta, Ga., and completed his residency training at the University of Miami School of Medicine in Miami, Fla.
From 1977 to 2002, he directed DOC (Doctors Ought to Care), a national nonprofit organization that created pioneering strategies in the clinic, classroom and community to counteract tobacco use and promotion. He served on the faculty of the Baylor College of Medicine in Waco, Texas, from 1987 to 1999.
Blum has given more than 1,700 invited lectures in all 50 states and has published more than 100 articles in peer-reviewed journals. As editor of the New York State Journal of Medicine and the Medical Journal of Australia in the 1980s, he published the first-ever themed issues of any medical journal devoted entirely to a consideration for ending the world tobacco pandemic.
For his work, Blum has received the U.S. Surgeon General’s Medallion, presented by former Surgeon General Dr. C. Everett Koop, the National Public Health Award of the American Academy of Family Physicians, the Gleitsman Foundation Award for health activism, the annual McGovern Achievement Award from the American School Health Association and the Washington Monthly Journalism Award.