The Sybil G. Jacobs Award - Adult Award for Outstanding Use of Tobacco Industry Documents

2007 Award Recipients

Dr. Allan Brandt is the dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences at Harvard University. His recent book, The Cigarette Century, focused exclusively on studies using the tobacco industry documents. In his book, Dr. Brandt illustrated the techniques used by Big Tobacco to confuse consumers about the health implications of smoking. His work with the documents has been widely recognized by his peers as groundbreaking, with his book being lauded as a 'brilliant history of America's struggle with cigarettes and with the tobacco industry,' by Dr. David Satcher of the Morehouse School of Medicine in a review of the book.

The second Sybil G. Jacobs Adult Award was presented to Dr. Elisa Tong, an Assistant Professor of Medicine at the University of California in Davis, California, where she teaches students how to do research using tobacco industry documents. Tong's work with the documents began before the Legacy Tobacco Documents Library was established and has continued since. Her paper published in The Lancet focusing on tobacco industry efforts to subvert the International Agency for Research on Cancer's secondhand smoke study has been recognized by the World Health Organization (WHO) - a move that led WHO to strengthen its conflict of interest rules when dealing with the tobacco industry. Her later work has been influential beyond tobacco control, influencing the environmental and public policy areas. Dr. Tong is also a highly acclaimed researcher and has used her public health research to motivate investigations in other areas.

2006 Award Recipients

Ray Goldstein is a sought-after freelance paralegal whose knowledge and expertise of the documents spans more than a decade. His work with the documents is well-known throughout the legal community and has been noted in such publications as Legal Assistant Today, The National Law Journal and Lawyers Weekly. In 1995 Goldstein assisted in Horowitz v. Lorillard, the first of many trials against the tobacco defendants utilizing the industry documents. In 2001, Goldstein played a key role in the Boeken case against Philip Morris - his rigorous research through thousands of industry documents paved the way to a jury verdict of $3 billion against the tobacco company.

Ruth E. Malone, R.N., Ph.D., one of two 2006 Sybil G. Jacobs Adult Awards winners, is a professor of nursing and health policy in the Department of Social & Behavioral Sciences, School of Nursing, University of California, San Francisco, whose research program focuses exclusively on studies using the tobacco industry documents. She and her team at UCSF use the information as a powerful tool to reach underserved communities that have been targeted by the tobacco industry, including African Americans, gays and lesbians, and the severely mentally ill and homeless populations. Their innovative work with the documents has been widely used by public health advocates and published in American Journal of Public Health, Tobacco Control, Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health, Academic Medicine, Nicotine and Tobacco Research, Social Science and Medicine, and other major professional journals.

2005 Award Recipient

Anne Landman is a research fellow at the University of California-San Francisco. Landman believed a wider audience should see information included in these documents and created Doc-Alert, an Internet list serve to which more than three thousand health advocates now subscribe. One posting included the R.J. Reynolds document titled Project S.C.U.M, which exposed that company's plans to increase sales of cigarettes to gay, immigrant, young and homeless people in the San Francisco area.

Landman's work also has been published in the international medical journal Tobacco Control, where she described the industry's aggression toward businesses that voluntarily enact smokefree policies, and in the American Journal of Public Health, where she exposed the political and social benefits that the tobacco industry derives from its youth smoking prevention programs.

2003 Award Recipient

Stella Aguinaga Bialous, RN, MScN, Dr. P.H. is a tobacco policy consultant and the president of Tobacco Policy International. She is the co-investigator of the Tobacco Free Nurses initiative and works as a consultant for the World Health Organization. She is a former board member of the International Society of Nurses in Cancer Care and is chair of the Society's Tobacco Control Task Force. Dr. Bialous is also a member of California's Tobacco Education and Research Oversight Committee (TEROC) and in 2003 was the first recipient of the American Legacy Foundation's Sybil G. Jacobs Adult Award for Outstanding Use of Tobacco Industry Documents for public health.

The Christine O. Gregoire Award - Youth/Young Adult Award for Outstanding Use of Tobacco Industry Documents

2007 Award Recipient

The 2007 Christine O. Gregoire Youth/Young Adult Award for Outstanding Use of Tobacco Industry Documents was presented to Kaitlyn Reilly, a student at George Washington University in Washington, D.C. Reilly has been involved in tobacco control since she was 11 years old. In 2006, she was named the National Youth Adovcate of the Year by the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids. As a senior at The St. Thomas Aquinas High School in 2006, Kaitlyn led a group of peers during a New Hampshire House Finance Committee meeting in urging lawmakers to use money raised by illegal cigarette sales to minors to help pay for tobacco prevention programs. Earlier, Kaitlyn's public testimony helped convince the Dover City Council in Dover, New Hampshire, to unanimously adopt her ordinance to make a local skate park smoke-free. She has been an active member for more than seven years of the Dover Youth to Youth, which works to reduce youth tobacco and drug use, as well as a co-founder of Ignite New Hampshire, a statewide anti-tobacco youth organization.

2006 Award Recipient

Andrew Berndt was a 23-year old grant manager for the Minnesota Department of Health when he received this award. Bernt has been involved in tobacco control since he was 12 years old, when he worked with the Minnesota Smoke Free Coalition to raise support for Minnesota's settlement with the tobacco industry, and was involved in the creation of Minnesota's powerful anti-tobacco movement, Target Market. He has managed a grant for the Minnesota Department of Health that uses the documents to educate young teens about tobacco use and how the industry markets to them, and ultimately to arm young teens around Minnesota with the skills they need to fight for smoke-free policies in their communities.

2005 Award Recipient

The Christine O. Gregoire Youth/Young Adult Award for Outstanding Use of Tobacco Industry Documents for 2005 was presented to Cynthia Loesch, at the time a sophomore at Boston College. The foundation presents this award to recognize Loesch's work in founding BOLD Teens Against Tobacco and her ongoing work with the group over the past many years. Loesch worked on a campaign designed to persuade The Boston Globe to stop advertising tobacco products, and she educates youth in her community about the dangers of tobacco use and exposure.

The Christine O. Gregoire Youth/Young Adult Award for Outstanding Use of Tobacco Industry Documents for 2005 was presented to Cynthia Loesch, at the time a sophomore at Boston College. The foundation presents this award to recognize Loesch's work in founding BOLD Teens Against Tobacco and her ongoing work with the group over the past many years. Loesch worked on a campaign designed to persuade The Boston Globe to stop advertising tobacco products, and she educates youth in her community about the dangers of tobacco use and exposure.

2003 Award Recipients

Former smoker Raymond Lader lost his father and several family friends to tobacco-related illness. His losses turned him into a leader among anti-tobacco youth advocates.

Former smoker Raymond Lader, lost his father and several family friends to tobacco-related illness. His losses turned him into a leader among anti-tobacco youth advocates.

Ray has lobbied at the Florida capitol in Tallahassee for tobacco settlement funds for tobacco prevention, and served as president of his high school's chapter of SWAT (Students Working Against Tobacco). He has convinced local restaurants to go smoke-free, raised more than $3,300 for the American Cancer Society Relay for Life and performed anti-tobacco puppet shows for more than 2,600 students.

Ashley Sobrinski, a junior at Ocean City High School in Ocean City, NJ, received The Christine O. Gregoire Youth Award for Outstanding Use of Tobacco Industry Documents at the first annual American Legacy Foundation Honors in New York. Ashley's leadership skills have already been recognized by organizations such as the American Cancer Society, the American Heart Association and the Holocaust Awareness Program, and she was recently named New Jersey National Teenager. Her involvement in anti-smoking efforts is exceptional. Ashley was named the 2003 Youth Advocate of the Year - East Region, for her efforts with the Campaign for Tobacco Free Kids and participated in the National Tar Wars Conference, giving a presentation to middle school students which incorporated tobacco industry documents and educated participants on the manipulative practices of the tobacco industry. A founding member of REBEL (Reaching Everyone by Exposing Lies), Ashley also served as Vice President of SCAT (Student Coalition Against Tobacco) at Ocean City High School.