For nearly 11 years as the head of Maine’s Center of Disease Control, Dr. Dora Anne Mills has steered Maine through one public heath crisis after another, from MTBE-poisoned water to anthrax scares. She spearheaded Maine’s pandemic flu plans and helped cut youth smoking by 60 percent in 10 years

When Maine officials talk about her, they use words like “expert” and “brilliant” and “passionate.”

“She really is a leader among leaders,” said Brenda Harvey, commissioner of the Department of Health and Human Services.

Now the American Medical Association agrees.

On Tuesday, the group presented Mills, a former Farmington pediatrician, with its highest honor for a public official.

AMA President William G. Plested said in a statement that Mills won the Dr. Nathan Davis Award for Outstanding Government Service for her “steadfast commitment to the public health needs of Maine.” She was one of eight people to get the award.

In Washington, D.C., to receive the award, Mills said she was thrilled and honored. And felt slightly guilty.

“I feel like the entire Maine CDC deserves it, not just me,” the state’s public health director said. “If I look good, it’s because they’ve made me look good.”

Raised in Farmington, Mills graduated from Bowdoin College in Brunswick, the University of Vermont College of Medicine, the Harvard School of Public Health and an internship and residency program at Children’s Hospital of Los Angeles. She did medical work in Tanzania, East Africa, Nepal and India before returning to Farmington as a pediatrician.

In 1996, four years after returning to Maine, a group of doctors suggested she try for a new job: head of the Maine CDC, then the Maine Bureau of Health. It took weeks, and more urging, before Mills took their suggestion seriously.

Then-Gov. Angus King hired her soon after.

“She came highly recommended,” King said. “I knew she was good.”

As the state’s top doctor, Mills was responsible for public health, from childhood shots to cancer clusters. She helped direct the state’s tobacco settlement money, she dealt with MTBE-contaminated drinking water and she helped the state through Anthrax scares after Sept. 11.

In recent years, she’s helped lower the rate of young smokers and has helped the state prepare for a pandemic flu outbreak.

Harvey, the commissioner and Mills’ boss, nominated her for the AMA award and gathered more than a half-dozen recommendations from Maine officials.

“To a person, everyone speaks to her ability to talk to all Maine people,” Harvey said. “She’s synonymous with public health in Maine.”

Mills was surprised a few weeks ago when she learned she won the AMA award. She didn’t even know she’d been nominated.

She’s proud of the award and honored, she said. But it’s the job she’s really happy to have.

“I can’t imagine being any more footnote than I am,” she said. “It’s been an incredible honor to serve the people of Maine.”

“It was Dr. Mills who broadened and strengthened my interest in public health until it became a real hallmark of my tenure as governor. She carried my best ideas further than even I envisioned, and convinced me to support many new public health initiatives that I had not foreseen,” King wrote in his recommendation letter to the AMA. “In other words, she led me, sometimes in no uncertain terms.”

Mills’ work continued after King left office and Gov. John Baldacci entered.