Grantee: Sterling M. McPherson, PhD

Sterling M. McPherson, PhD

Organization:

• Washington State University

Current Title
Professor, Director and Interim Vice Dean for Research

Describe your scientific identity.
I am a behavioral pharmacologist focused on the development of evidence-based therapeutics that treat addiction, with an emphasis on co-addiction and mechanisms of therapeutics.

What are your research interests?
My primary interest is the development of therapies for the treatment of addiction and understanding the neurobiological (e.g., genetic antecedents) and neurobehavioral (e.g., use of one substance triggering relapse of a common co-occurring addiction) mechanisms of efficacious therapies for co-addiction.

What is the significance of your current research project?
Together, tobacco and alcohol kill more than half a million people in the United States every year, making co-addiction to these substances the leading cause of preventable death. Theoretically framed within the Addiction Neuroclinical Assessment with hypothesized mechanisms in core domains (i.e., incentive salience, negative emotionality and cognitive function), target smoking and alcohol use by implementing an evidence-based behavioral treatment (contingency management) for alcohol among participants who have initiated the frontline pharmacotherapy (varenicline) for smoking cessation.

What motivated you to work in tobacco control research?
I came into the area of tobacco control by way of observing that a high percentage of our participants in clinical trials of alcohol, methamphetamine and opioid use smoke. While this is not a new observation per se, focusing on the development of novel therapeutics focused on smoking and addiction to another substance is a major gap in the literature.

Describe something that had a profound influence on your program of research or scientific interests (an "ah-ha!" moment).
We conducted several secondary analyses on our existing clinical trials and found a consistent effect of contingency management (i.e., a behavioral therapeutic) on smoking behavior, even though smoking was not the targeted substance. We then conducted several small, prospective clinical trials that provided support for our original hypothesis. This has led to several investigations in our research group designed to leverage the overlapping neurobiology and neurobehavioral in order to effectively treat co-addiction. In addition, we plan to investigate the mechanisms that do and do not lead to both short- and long-term change in primary outcomes.

Selected training, awards, and honors:

• Postdoctoral Fellowship in Behavioral Pharmacology, Washington State University, Spokane, WA
• National Institutes of Health Fellow, Summer Institute on Randomized Clinical Trials, sponsored by the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute (NHLBI) and the Office of Behavioral and Social Science Research (OBSSR)
• Elected Member, Washington State Academy of Sciences
• Joseph Cochin Young Investigator Award for Excellence, College on Problems of Drug Dependence
• Elected Fellow, Society for Psychopharmacology and Drug Abuse
• Elected Board Member, College on Problems of Drug Dependence
• Visiting Professor, King's College London

---