Dr. Glantz is the American Legacy Foundation Distinguished Professor of Tobacco Control at the University of California, San Francisco. He conducts research on a wide range of topics ranging from the health effects of secondhand smoke to the efficacy of different tobacco control policies and how the tobacco industry fights tobacco control programs.

Dr. Glantz is Principal Investigator for the $20 million 5 year Tobacco Center of Regulatory Science “Improved Models to Inform Tobacco Product Regulation,” that was funded in September 2013 as part of a first-of-its-kind tobacco science regulatory program by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and the National Institutes of Health.  

He is author or coauthor of numerous publications related to secondhand smoke and tobacco control, as well as many papers on cardiovascular function and biostatistics. He has written several books, including the widely used Primer of Biostatistics. He has also written a number of books including The Cigarette Papers, Tobacco Wars: Inside the California Battles, Tobacco: Biology and Politics for high school students, The Uninvited Guest, a story about secondhand smoke, for second graders, and Bad Acts.

He is running an educational project, SmokeFreeMovies, to end use of movies to promote tobacco. His TobaccoScam campaign helped break the alliance between Big Tobacco and the hospitality industry. Working with the UCSF Library, he has taken the lead in making over 82 million pages of previously secret tobacco industry documents available to the entire world via the UCSF Legacy Tobacco Documents Library. This effort has help create a whole new area of scientific investigation based on tobacco industry documents.

He served for 10 years as an Associate Editor of the Journal of the American College of Cardiology and is a member of the California State Scientific Review Panel on Toxic Air Contaminants. He was elected to the Institute of Medicine in 2005.

His work has attracted considerable attention from the tobacco industry, which has sued the University of California (unsuccessfully) twice in an effort to stop Prof. Glantz' work.