Dr. Mermelstein is Associate Professor of Psychology and Public Health and Deputy Director of the Health Research and Policy Center, University of Illinois at Chicago. She holds a Ph.D. in clinical and community psychology from the University of Oregon. Currently, Dr. Mermelstein is a principal investigator for the Center for Disease Control and Prevention's Tobacco Control Network, whose primary goal is to develop and implement collaborative research projects on youth tobacco use and prevention. Dr. Mermelstein is conducting a study of recycling failed quit attempts and relapsers in smoking cessation for the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute. She also works on another study, funded by the National Cancer Institute, investigating social support, motivational strategies, and relapse prevention for smoking cessation among low-educated women. The interventions involved include both intensive clinic-based approaches to cessation, as well as self-help and media-based programs.

Dr. Ockene has a Ph.D. and an M.Ed. in counseling psychology and an M.A. in science education. Her major research focus has been the development of a patient-centered counseling model for physician-based interventions for smoking, alcohol abuse, and diet. Her research also focuses on the factors affecting lifestyle behavior changes, the relationship of lifestyle behaviors to disease, women's health, and community-based interventions for prevention and control of disease. Dr. Ockene teaches medical students, residents in training, community physicians, other health care providers, and public health students how to help patients make lifestyle changes. She has developed teaching modules and curricula to integrate patient-centered counseling into undergraduate and graduate medical education.

Dr. Ockene was a scientific editor of the 25th Anniversary U.S. Surgeon General's Report on Smoking and Health and of the 1990 U.S. Surgeon General's Report: The Health Benefits of Smoking Cessation and a member of Surgeon General Koop's National Interagency Advisory Committee on Smoking and Health. Dr. Ockene's clinical practice involves intervention for smoking, diet, exercise and stress, chronic disease management, and transitions. Dr. Ockene started the Division of Preventive and Behavioral Medicine 15 years ago to integrate clinical medicine with public health and emphasize the importance of the interaction between mind and body.

Dr. Pentz is Director of the Center for Prevention Policy Research, University of Southern California (USC). She received her B.A. in psychology and mathematics from Hamilton College and her Ph.D. in clinical and school psychology from Syracuse University. Her research focuses on tobacco policy and prevention, as well as community- and school-based drug abuse prevention. For the past 12 years, Dr. Pentz has evaluated the effectiveness of school programs, media campaigns, parent involvement, community organization, and local policy changes as tools for the prevention of tobacco use and smoking cessation in adolescents. Her research into drug abuse includes an evaluation of the effects of national alcohol warning label legislation on adolescent drinking, the relationship of maternal marijuana use to acute nonlymphocytic childhood leukemia, the effects of coping- and stress-preventive interventions on multiple adolescent problem behaviors, and the relationship between prevention programs and policy change. She has authored more than 150 publications and scientific papers on the design and evaluation of interventions for the prevention of adolescent drug use, stress, and chronic disease. As part of the USC doctoral program in health behavior, Dr. Pentz trains students and postdoctoral fellows in prevention theories and methods. Her research is funded by NIDA and the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, the National Cancer Institute, the Kaufman Foundation, the Lilly Endowment, and the State of California Tobacco Prevention Research Program.

Dr. Perkins is a Professor of Psychiatry, Psychology, and Epidemiology at the University of Pittsburgh. He earned his B.S. in psychology from Oberlin College and his M.S. and Ph.D. in clinical psychology from the University of Iowa. Dr. Perkins has served on the editorial boards of the Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology and Psychopharmacology and in 1993 was Guest Editor of a special issue of the Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology on Smoking Cessation. He is also a member of the Basic Behavioral Science Research Grant Review Committee for NIDA and is a Fellow of the American Psychological Association and of the Society of Behavioral Medicine. Dr. Perkins has published more than 100 scientific papers, most of which are on the subjective, behavioral, and physiological effects of nicotine or smoking in humans.

Since 1995 Dr. Picciotto has been an Assistant Professor of Psychiatry and Pharmacology at the Yale University School of Medicine. Previously, Dr. Picciotto worked as a postdoctoral Fellow in the laboratory of Dr. Jean-Pierre Changeux at the Pasteur Institute in Paris, France. There, using molecular generic techniques, she developed a line of mice lacking one of the primary subunits of the brain receptor for nicotine. Currently, Dr. Picciotto directs her own laboratory at Yale, where she develops models of nicotine addiction using laboratory mice. She also investigates the role of nicotine in other behavioral paradigms using mutant and wild-type mice. Her laboratory is funded by grants from the National Alliance for Research on Schizophrenia and Depression and NIDA.

Dr. Pierce is the Sam M. Walton Professor of Cancer Research and leads the Cancer Prevention and Control Program at the Cancer Center, University of California at San Diego (UCSD). He received professional training as an epidemiologist at McCaster University in Ontario, Canada, and graduate training in psychology and communication research at Stanford University. In 1987 Dr. Pierce left his position as Professor at the University of Sydney to become the Founding Chief of the Epidemiology Branch at the Office on Smoking and Health, Centers for Disease Control. He moved to the UCSD Department of Family and Preventive Medicine and the UCSD Cancer Center in 1990. Since then, Dr. Pierce has been responsible for the evaluation of the California Tobacco Control Program. He has published more than 135 papers. His primary focus is the epidemiology of smoking behavior and environmental influences on the uptake and cessation of smoking. He published one of several original papers linking tobacco marketing with the uptake of smoking, an active area of his research. His publications have been cited more than 800 times in the peer-reviewed literature.

Dr. Rigotti is an internist who has been active in smoking cessation and tobacco control research, teaching, and practice for more than 15 years. A graduate of Harvard Medical School, Dr. Rigotti trained in internal medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) and completed a General Medicine Fellowship at Harvard. From 1985 to 1990 she was Associate Director of Harvard's Institute for the Study of Smoking Behavior and Policy, during which time she conducted some of the first studies of no-smoking laws and served as an editor of the 1989 U.S. Surgeon General's Report on Smoking. Since 1990 she has been based at Massachusetts General Hospital, where she founded and directs the Tobacco Research and Treatment Center. She is an Assistant Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School. Dr. Rigotti's research interests encompass smoking cessation treatment methods, evaluating tobacco control public policy, and exploring the role of medical care systems in discouraging tobacco use. Recent work includes evaluating the impact of policies designed to reduce youth access to tobacco, testing new pharmacological agents for smoking cessation, investigating hospital-based smoking cessation interventions, and assessing physician compliance with guidelines for treating smokers in office practice. Dr. Rigotti lectures and consults nationally on tobacco treatment and policy issues and was a pioneer in the efforts to train physicians and other health care professionals to promote smoking cessation with their patients.

Dr. Shiffman is Professor of Psychology and Director of the Smoking Research Group and the Clinical Psychology Center, University of Pittsburgh. He earned his Ph.D. in clinical psychology at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) in 1981. While at UCLA, he began work on smoking and nicotine dependence in the Psychopharmacology Unit at UCLA's Department of Psychiatry. Dr. Shiffman's research has concentrated on the behavioral and psychosocial aspects of cigarette smoking and nicotine dependence. His work includes studies of the nicotine withdrawal syndrome, the process of relapse following smoking cessation, and individual differences in nicotine dependence. Dr. Shiffman has also developed treatment programs for smoking cessation. His contributions include the development of Ecological Momentary Assessment methods for computer monitoring of real-time experience in people's natural environments. Dr. Shiffman has served on review and advisory boards for NIDA, the National Cancer Institute, the American Cancer Society, and others. He has been a Fellow of the American Psychological Association, the American Psychological Society, and the Society of Behavioral Medicine and has served on the board of the Society for Research on Nicotine and Tobacco. He has published numerous scientific papers on smoking and nicotine addiction and has contributed to several editions of the U.S. Surgeon General's Report on smoking and health.

Dr. Slade is a Professor of Medicine, Robert Wood Johnson Medical School, University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey, in New Brunswick. A specialist in addiction medicine, Dr. Slade has long focused on the clinical and public health aspects of the tobacco problem. Since the mid-1980s, the role of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in the regulation of tobacco products has been a major interest, and he has assisted the FDA with research in this area. Dr. Slade founded the Committee on Nicotine Dependence of the American Society of Addiction Medicine (ASAM) and, since 1988, has assisted ASAM with its annual Clinical Conference on Nicotine. He directs a consultation service in New Jersey that helps treatment programs for addiction address tobacco and nicotine issues. Dr. Slade's interest in tobacco product promotions prompted research that demonstrated the close association between tobacco promotions and adolescent tobacco use. Dr. Slade has also established a lending library of tobacco company promotions for use by public health authorities and members of the media. He is a past President of Stop Teenage Addiction to Tobacco. With C. Tracy Orleans,

Dr. Slade coedited the major clinical textbook on nicotine addiction. He was a member of the team that conducted a scholarly analysis of previously secret documents from the Brown and Williamson Tobacco Company. This analysis became a landmark series of articles in the Journal of the American Medical Association in 1995 as well as a book, The Cigarette Papers. Dr. Slade has contributed to several Surgeon General's Reports on smoking and to the recent NCI monograph on cigars. He has written numerous articles and chapters about tobacco and tobacco control policy.

Dr. Stitzer is a research psychologist at the Behavioral Pharmacology Research Unit of the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, where she directs a substance abuse research program. Her research aims to better understand the factors that maintain substance use behaviors and that interfere with abstinence or promote relapse and to develop and evaluate combined pharmacological and behavioral treatments for substance abuse disorders. Her work has targeted both illicit drug abuse and tobacco dependence. She has participated in several research organizations and study panels, including the Agency for Health Care Policy and Research panel that developed the empirically based Smoking Cessation Clinical Practice Guidelines. The Behavioral Pharmacology Research Unit is a nationally recognized human drug abuse research laboratory. Its mission is to understand the clinical pharmacology of abused drugs and treatment medications and to develop and evaluate new approaches for the treatment of drug abuse. Training and research dissemination activities enhance the unit's broader impact on the field of drug abuse research.

Since 1987 Dr. Swan has served as Director of the Center for Health Sciences (CHS) of SRI International. CHS uses a multidisciplinary research approach to address complex challenges that arise at the interface of the basic sciences, clinical medicine, and health care economics. The work at CHS has focused on two key problems: (a) the predictors of relapse after individuals have stopped smoking and (b) the influence of genetics on smoking and related behaviors. The CHS staff has published numerous papers in each of these areas. The approach to these problems has focused on the use of methodologies from a number of disciplines, including behavior genetics, epidemiology, sociology, economics, psychology, and medicine.

Dr. Tyndale received her Ph.D. in 1991 in pharmacology and trained at the National Cancer Institute and at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) before joining the Centre for Addictions and Mental Health and the Department of Pharmacology, University of Toronto. As part of her Ph.D. work, Dr. Tyndale cloned and characterized (in vitro and in vivo) a number of drug-metabolizing enzyme variants of the cytochrome P450 family. In addition, she identified the first of this enzyme family in human and rodent brains. Her postdoctoral fellowship at UCLA involved training in molecular neurosciences. Dr. Tyndale has received more than 15 awards and scholarships, published more than 40 articles and book chapters, given more than 100 presentations, and currently has three grants, one from NIDA and two from MRC of Canada.

Dr. Tyndale's research has two main directions. The first is the characterization of drug- metabolizing enzymes and receptors in the brain, their effects on drug toxicity, and individual differences in drug response. The second area, in collaboration with Dr. Edward Sellers of the Departments of Pharmacology, Psychiatry, and Medicine and the Centre for Research in Women's Health, has focused on how genetic and environmental variation in the metabolism of drugs of abuse, alters the risk for dependence and patterns of drug use. Last year, they published the first example of a common pharmacogenetic risk factor after identifying a gene that, when defective, prevented individuals from becoming dependent on oral opiates. Recently, they have identified a gene responsible for the removal of nicotine, which when defective, results in protection from becoming tobacco dependent and reduces the consumption of cigarettes in dependent smokers.

Dr. Varmus has been Director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) since November 1993. Previously, he was professor of microbiology, biochemistry, and biophysics at the University of California at San Francisco. Dr. Varmus shared the 1989 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Dr. Michael Bishop for demonstrating that cancer genes (oncogenes) can arise from normal cellular genes.

Dr. Volkow pursued her medical training at the National University of Mexico (UNAM) and her residency training in psychiatry at New York University. She is currently Chairman of the Medical Department at Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL), Director of Nuclear Medicine at BNL, and Director of the NIDA-DOE Regional Neuroimaging Center at BNL. She is also an Associate Professor in the Department of Psychiatry, the State University of New York at Stony Brook. Her work focuses on the mechanisms underlying the reinforcing, addictive, and toxic properties of drugs of abuse in the human brain, as well as the neurochemical processes associated with vulnerability for drug abuse. She collaborates with the BNL-PET group on studies in the characterization of the dopamine system and its effects by drugs, aging, and neurodegenerative diseases. She has more authored than 185 peer-reviewed publications, edited three books, and written more than 25 book chapters and 30 non-peer-reviewed manuscripts. She is principal investigator for four NIH grants and two DOE grants.

Dr. Volkow served as a member of the National Institute of Mental Health Study Section and as Chair of the 1997 Organizing Committee for the Frontier in Science Symposia organized by the National Academy of Science, and is a Scientific Advisor for the intramural program of the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism. Awards include the Premio Robins Best Medical Student of the Generation, UNAM (1978); National Award for the Outstanding Medical Student (1981); Premio Gabino Barrera Best Student National University of Mexico, UNAM (1981); Laughlin Fellowship Award (1984); Scanditronix Scholarship (1985); and the Distinguished Research and Development Award, Brookhaven National Laboratory (1995).