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ASH Honors Outgoing Board Chair Doug Blanke and Introduces New Board Chair Carolyn Dresler, MD, MPA
A Tribute to Service and the Next Era of Progress
WASHINGTON, DC – JANUARY 13, 2026 – Action on Smoking and Health (ASH) extends our deepest gratitude to Doug Blanke for his three years of service as Chair of the ASH Board of Trustees. During his tenure, ASH led a dramatic change in the way the public health community approaches the tobacco epidemic, from a “control” paradigm to a vision without commercial tobacco products. Mr. Blanke joined the ASH Board nearly 15 years ago and has been fighting the tobacco epidemic for decades. ASH is pleased that Mr. Blanke will remain a Board Trustee and an active supporter of ASH’s mission to reach zero deaths from tobacco.
Mr. Blanke was the founder and executive director, until his retirement, of the Public Health Law Center (PHLC) at the Mitchell Hamline School of Law. PHLC has been the premier provider of legal technical assistance in the tobacco policy field since 2003. PHLC’s series of meetings over a decade ago – Eyes on the Prize – was the direct antecedent to ASH’s Project Sunset, the campaign to phase out the sale of commercial tobacco products, and ASH has continued to work closely with PHLC.
As an Assistant Attorney General of Minnesota, Mr. Blanke played a key role in the historic litigation that resulted in the release of the internal documents of the tobacco industry, and in multi-state initiatives to eliminate smoking in fast food restaurants and prevent tobacco sales to minors. Read more in his complete biography here.
Today, ASH welcomes our incoming Board Chair, Carolyn Dresler, MD, MPA. She is trained as a thoracic surgical oncologist and pursued utilizing the human rights-based approach to the tobacco epidemic that ASH embraced nearly 15 years ago. Dr. Dresler was trained at Memorial Sloan Kettering and the University of Toronto as a thoracic surgical oncologist with clinical practices at Washington University and Fox Chase Cancer Center. She retired in 2018 as the Associate Director for Medical and Health Sciences for the Office of Science at the Center for Tobacco Products at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA).
Prior to working at the FDA, Dr. Dresler was the Director for the Arkansas Department of Health Tobacco Prevention and Cessation Program. She was also the Head of Unit for Tobacco and Cancer at the International Agency for Research on Cancer in Lyon, France.
Dr. Dresler was awarded the American Lung Association’s 2022 C. Everett Koop Unsung Hero Award “for her remarkable career and contributions she made to significantly reducing tobacco use in Colorado, the U.S. and around the world,” said the American Lung Association in their statement. At the time, ASH released a video featuring global colleagues reflecting on Dr. Dresler’s extensive impact to commemorate the occasion. Dr. Dresler is retired and continues to spend much of her time volunteering for ASH and working to advance public health locally and in her home state of Colorado.
ASH thanks our entire Board of Trustees for supporting this seamless transition.
ACTION ON SMOKING AND HEALTH
Founded in 1967, Action on Smoking and Health (ASH) is America’s oldest anti-tobacco organization, dedicated to a world with ZERO tobacco deaths. Because tobacco is the leading cause of preventable death worldwide, ASH supports bold solutions proportionate to the magnitude of the problem. https://ash.org
