Cheryl A.M. Anderson to receive the American Heart Association’s 2026 Chairman’s Award
The American Heart Association will honor Cheryl A.M. Anderson, Ph.D., M.P.H., FAHA, with its 2026 Chairman’s Award for more than two decades of volunteer leadership spanning science, advocacy, community engagement and donor stewardship. The recognition will be presented during Scientific Sessions 2026 in Chicago, a meeting that draws global attention to cardiovascular research and practice updates.
Anderson is founding dean of the Herbert Wertheim School of Public Health and Human Longevity Science at the University of California, San Diego. Her career has combined epidemiology, nutrition science and public health leadership, with a sustained focus on how diet and behavior shape cardiovascular risk across populations. The award places equal weight on scientific contribution and service to the Association’s mission, which fits Anderson’s record: she has not only studied prevention, but helped build the institutional and community pathways that allow prevention to reach people outside academic settings.
Her work has been especially influential in nutrition and cardiovascular disease, where evidence can be difficult to translate into day-to-day eating patterns, policy choices and clinical counseling. Sodium intake, dietary quality and sustained behavior change sit at the center of that challenge. In practice, those factors influence blood pressure, vascular injury, kidney strain and metabolic risk long before a patient develops overt cardiovascular disease. Anderson’s research has helped define those relationships more clearly and has strengthened the public health argument that dietary guidance must be treated as a front-line prevention strategy rather than an afterthought.
One sentence captures the reach of her service: she has helped move nutrition science from recommendation to implementation.
Community training and prevention at scale
A major recent example of Anderson’s community-facing leadership came through UC San Diego’s Revive and Survive initiative, developed with the American Heart Association’s San Diego team. The initiative reached its goal of training 1 million people in San Diego in bystander CPR. Forty-nine partners from public health, public safety, education, business and community organizations were involved in the effort, reflecting a broad coalition model rather than a single-institution campaign.
The public health stakes are immediate. Bystander CPR can preserve circulation during sudden cardiac arrest, buying time until emergency responders arrive and improving the chance that resuscitation efforts succeed. Large-scale training programs matter because cardiac arrest often occurs outside hospitals, where the first responder is usually a family member, coworker or passerby rather than a clinician. A community that knows how to act gains a physiologic advantage in the narrow window before irreversible injury begins.
Anderson’s role in this effort fits a broader philosophy that cardiovascular prevention cannot live only in journals, classrooms or policy statements. It has to be operationalized in neighborhoods, workplaces and schools, where the gap between evidence and action is often widest.
Food is Medicine, policy, and the translation of evidence
Anderson has also played a central role in the emerging field of Food is Medicine. As part of the volunteer leadership team guiding the Association’s inaugural Food is Medicine research planning efforts, she helped shape a portfolio focused on how nutrition interventions can support engagement, adherence and lasting behavior change. That focus is clinically important because dietary advice alone often fails when patients face cost barriers, food insecurity or inconsistent access to healthy options.
Nutrition interventions work best when they are practical enough to be used repeatedly and long enough to influence physiology. Improved eating patterns can reduce blood pressure burden, support glycemic control and lower long-term vascular risk, but only when patients can sustain them. The research agenda she helped guide is built around that reality, linking food access and behavioral support to measurable health outcomes.
Her policy work extends well beyond the Association. Anderson has advanced nutrition-related public policy through the American Heart Association’s Council on Lifestyle and Cardiometabolic Health, served on the National Academy of Medicine’s Food and Nutrition Board and contributed to the 2025 U.S. Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee. She also represented the Association on the writing committee for the 2026 multi-society Joint Guideline on the Management of Dyslipidemia and co-authored the Association’s 2026 scientific statement, “Dietary Guidance to Improve Cardiovascular Health.”
Two decades inside the Association’s scientific and volunteer infrastructure
The award also recognizes long service to the American Heart Association itself. Anderson has been a dedicated volunteer since 2004 and has served on the National Board of Directors. She has chaired the Council Operations Committee, the Council on Epidemiology and Prevention and the Nutrition Committee for the Council on Lifestyle and Cardiometabolic Health. Her committee work has also included the Science Advisory and Coordinating Committee and the Advocacy Coordinating Committee.
Those roles matter because associations do not advance on research alone. They depend on people who can connect councils, volunteers, advocacy teams and scientific planners into a coherent strategy. Anderson has operated at that intersection for years, helping professional members align their expertise with public health action. Her influence has been organizational as much as intellectual, strengthening the structure through which scientific evidence reaches clinicians, policymakers and communities.
The breadth of her contributions is consistent with the kind of leadership the Chairman’s Award is meant to honor. The award recognizes volunteers whose impact reaches beyond published research to the harder work of building consensus, recruiting talent and keeping public health goals grounded in evidence.
Research, credentials, and the next generation of prevention science
Anderson’s research portfolio has deepened understanding of how sodium, nutrition and healthy eating patterns influence cardiovascular disease, chronic kidney disease, Type 2 diabetes and other chronic conditions. Those links are biologically intertwined. Dietary sodium affects blood pressure and vascular load; nutritional quality influences metabolic health and inflammation; and sustained dietary change can reduce the cumulative burden that drives chronic disease over time.
As founding dean of UC San Diego’s Herbert Wertheim School of Public Health and Human Longevity Science, she has also led growth in interdisciplinary education, research and innovation. She serves as a professor in the division of nephrology and hypertension and in the department of radiation medicine and applied sciences, and holds the Hood Family Endowed Dean’s Chair in Public Health. Her academic path includes a bachelor’s degree from Brown University, a master of public health from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and a master of science in epidemiology plus a doctorate in nutrition sciences from the University of Washington, where she also completed postdoctoral training in epidemiology.
Her election to the National Academy of Medicine in 2016 and editorial roles with Diabetes Care and the Annual Review of Nutrition reflect that standing. The honor from the American Heart Association arrives with a clear message: prevention science still depends on leaders who can bridge the lab, the clinic and the community without losing fidelity to any of them.
The release does not describe a new trial, treatment or endpoint. Its significance lies in the kind of infrastructure that makes future prevention work possible: trained communities, evidence-based policy, and leadership that can keep nutrition and cardiovascular health in the same frame when clinical priorities compete for attention.