A Tribute to Warren K. Bickel
Warren K. Bickel, PhD, passed away on Saturday, September 28, 2024, from complications of Stage 4 pancreatic cancer. Many involved with the ITC Project already knew about Warren's illness, as he was quite open about it after being diagnosed this past spring. Warren remained upbeat and positive throughout the illness and continued to contribute to research and writing right up until his untimely passing. His wisdom, friendship, and collegiality will be sorely missed.
Warren’s main contribution to the ITC Project was his creation of the experimental tobacco marketplace (ETM) as a way to test how tobacco control policies might impact hypothetical purchase tasks. The ETM was ideally suited to test the impact of a rapidly expanding marketplace of tobacco products, including e-cigarettes, heated tobacco products, and more recently nicotine pouches. Warren and his colleagues used the ETM to experimentally investigate how policies impacting access to alternative nicotine products such as restrictions on product flavors, nicotine levels, and taxes would impact demand for conventional cigarettes. The experimental findings allowed the ITC research team to preview the impact of real world policies as they were being implemented in different countries so the likely impact of these policies on actual consumer behavior could be assessed in population surveys of different consumer user groups. The ETM paradigm has become a standard research methodology widely used to predict cross product elasticities and the impact of access policies on tobacco use behaviors.
Needless to say Warren’s involvement with the ITC Project only briefly touches on his extraordinary career. For example, four decades ago, Warren was first author on pivotal studies in the development of buprenorphine as a medication for treatment of opioid use disorder as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of North Carolina with Linda Dykstra (1983-1984) and Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine with Maxine Stitzer, George Bigelow, and Roland Griffiths (1984-1985). Warren began his pioneering research on the application of behavioral economics to the study of addiction while still an Assistant Professor and continued to make this a focus of his research, which contributed a steady stream of impactful innovations throughout his career such as the use of demand curves to characterize human drug self-administration, role of delay discounting in addiction vulnerability, hypothetical purchase tasks, and understanding addiction as reinforcement pathology. Warren held faculty positions at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University, Department of Psychiatry (1985-1987), University of Vermont, Departments of Psychiatry and Psychology (1987-2004), University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences, Department of Psychiatry (2004-2011), and most recently at the Fralin Biomedical Research Institute at VTC, Virginia Tech (2011-2024).
Warren is one of the most widely cited scientists in the field of addiction research. He published more than 500 journal articles, which have been cited over 50,000 times, and received many prestigious scientific awards for excellence throughout his career, including the CPDD Joseph Cochin Young Investigator Award, NIH MERIT Award, and the CPDD Nathan B. Eddy Award. Importantly, Warren’s contributions to the field will continue to be realized through his mentorship of dozens of predoctoral and postdoctoral fellows, who will continue to make contributions to the field of addiction science for generations to come.
https://news.vt.edu/articles/2024/10/research_fralinbiomed_bickel_1002.html
