Eric Lindblom is a senior scholar at the O’Neill Institute. He previously served as the O’Neill Institute’s director for tobacco control and food and drug law from 2016 through 2019, after working at the institute on a detail from the FDA’s Center for Tobacco Products from 2014 to 2016.
Lindblom currently works with researchers, lawyers, and others as an independent consultant on both domestic and international tobacco control matters. Besides being a consultant on several research grants, he serves an expert witness in litigation against tobacco companies, currently including lawsuits against the Juul e-cigarette company. Lindblom also brings his legal, economic, and policy expertise to bear on projects relating to the public health regulation of other products, with a special focus on alcohol and legalized cannabis. He is also the author of a number of major papers on FDA tobacco and cannabis product regulation.
Before joining the O’Neill Institute, Lindblom was a senior advisor to the director of FDA’s Center for Tobacco Products and the director of the Center’s Office of Policy. As a member of the leadership team at the Center for Tobacco Products, Lindblom worked on the full range of FDA tobacco-related activities, with a special focus on legal, policy, and economic analyses of existing and proposed CTP initiatives. Before joining the FDA, Lindblom was the director for policy research and general counsel for the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids (TFK). While with TFK, Lindblom focused on legal and economic tobacco control issues and also served as the only public health representative on the USDA Federal Trade Advisory Committee for tobacco and other commodities.
Lindblom holds a J.D. from Harvard Law and a B.A. in political science from Yale University.