Public health

In 1973, Bal was appointed as Assistant Professor of Family & Community Medicine at the University of Arizona College of Medicine.^[3][6] While continuing to teach at the University of Arizona, as a physician and epidemiologist, he held various positions in the Pima County Health Department. In 1974, he also served part-time as interim director for communicable diseases after the retirement of the previous director, Clarence Robbins.^[8] Bal went on to serve as deputy director,^[9] and was later director of the health department from 1977 to 1981.^[10]

In 1981, Bal was appointed as a public health medical officer and later was promoted to become the head of the Cancer Control Branch of California's Department of Health Services.^[11] He spent 25 years in the department,^[1] gaining renown for his design of and contributions to California's anti-tobacco campaign that was replicated in many states in the U.S. and several countries around the world.^[2][12][13] The campaign was funded by the passage of Proposition 99 in 1988, which imposed a 25-cent tax on every pack of cigarettes sold in California.^[2] The funds generated were used to aggressively control tobacco use in the state,^[14] by addressing the predatory advertising and marketing practices of the tobacco industry. Another creation of this program was a statewide effort to address second-hand smoke including legislation banning smoking in California restaurants and bars. Bal was a principal architect behind the California initiative of using public funds to counter the tobacco industry's deceptive public relations and advertising campaign by designing and implementing a counter-advertising effort.^[2][11]

In 2001, he served as the national president of the American Cancer Society (ACS).^[15][16] Bal is an active member of ACS,^[4] and throughout his career has held various leadership positions in the organization's local and state branches.^[11]

In 2005, Bal joined the Hawaii State Department of Health as special advisor to the director of the department and district health officer for the Island of Kauai. While in Hawaii, he was responsible for bringing in federal funds to design and operate several public health efforts, focused especially on obesity control, physical activity and socio-economic disparity.^[1][17][18] Among them, the best known is Tropic Care Kauai, a biennial two-week United States Department of Defense-funded training program that brought about 400 healthcare professionals each year to Kauai to provide medical, dental, optometric and other health care to Kauai's population in 2012, 2014, 2016, and 2017.^{[19][20][21][22][23]} The program has benefited many Kauai residents, especially in the provision of much-needed dental care (which is often not covered by health insurance), and provided about 3,500 pairs of free prescription eyeglasses in just the first year.^[24] Bal was the one who first researched, applied for and brought these military training programs to Kauai,^[25] and then exported them to the other Hawaiian islands. In July 2016, Bal retired as Kauai District Health Officer after more than 11 years at the position,^[1][26] but the programs like Tropic Care continue.^[25]

Academic

Throughout his over four-decade-long career in public health, Bal has had clinical appointments at several medical schools. In the 1970s, he was a professor at the University of Arizona College of Medicine.^[8] From 1981 to 2005, he was a professor at the University of California School of Medicine at Davis.^[11] Since 2005, Bal has been a professor at the John A. Burns School of Medicine and the Cancer Center of the University of Hawaii. He was appointed to the University of Hawaii Board of Regents in 2014.^[4] Bal has been most active in all these universities' teaching and research programs and has been principal investigator on several National Cancer Institute^[11] and Centers for Disease Control funded cancer prevention and control projects.^[17] He has been on the editorial boards or been an active reviewer for several peer-reviewed medical journals, as well as for the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences. Bal has been a frequent national and international speaker.^[11] He gave the commencement address at Brown University Medical School in 2005.^[27]