An anti-smoking activist, Cannell was featured in the New York Times in the 1980s for turning away smokers from his clinic in West Virginia.
Cannell's stance received praise from some medical colleagues, while others criticised his approach as fraught with potential ethical problems.
Cannell, noticing discrepancies between his young patients' performance in school and their grade level, formed the nonprofit Friends for Education[3] to study the reported test score rankings of poverty-stricken states such as Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas, South Carolina, Tennessee, Georgia and Kentucky.
Cannell's findings prompted wider study of the issue and were reported in the national press including the New York Times, NBC News and the Wall Street Journal.
[3][4][5] Friends for Education filed sexual discrimination complaints against Raleigh County and the West Virginia State Department of Education, claiming women held 80% of the low paying teaching jobs, but men held 80% of the higher paying administrative positions.