Steven A. Schroeder, MD 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 20 American health professional organizations and health care institutions to increase the cessation rate for patients who smoke. It has expanded the types of clinician groups that support cessation, developed an alternative cessation message (Ask, Advise,Refer), and created new ways to market toll-free telephone quit lines.
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 the American people. It developed new programs in substance abuse prevention and treatment, care at the end of life, and health insurance expansion for children.
Schroeder graduated with honors 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 Officer 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, and the work force, with over 270 publications. He currently serves as chairman of the International Advisory Committee of the Ben Gurion School of Medicine, is a member of the editorial board of the New England Journal of Medicine, a director of the James Irvine Foundation, the Save Ellis Island Foundation, the Charles R. Drew University of Medicine and Science, and the Robina Foundation, and is President of the Harvard Medical Alumni Association. He formerly chaired the American Legacy Foundation, was a Council member of the Institute of Medicine and an Overseer of Harvard. He has six honorary doctoral degrees and numerous awards.
Schroeder lives in Tiburon with his wife Sally, a retired schoolteacher. Their two sons are physicians, one a cardiologist and one a pediatrician. Steve and Sally have two granddaughters.