Warren K. Bickel, Ph.D.

Samuel McClure, Ph.D.

Warren K. Bickel, Ph.D.
Virginia Tech Carilion Inaugural Professor of Behavioral Health Research
Director, Addiction Recovery Research Center
Co-Director, Center for Transformative Research on Health Behaviors
Virginia Tech Carilion Research Institute

Samuel McClure, Ph.D.
Associate Professor of Psychology
Arizona State University

Overview

The speaker will describe a translational research program that explores the application of basic behavioral findings on delay discounting, decision science, and the neural underpinnings of these processes to the development of interventions for alcohol and drug abuse, obesity, and other behavioral risk factors.

Biographies

Warren K. Bickel, Ph.D., is an accomplished scholar and researcher in addiction and health behavior research. He received his Ph.D. in developmental and child psychology from the University of Kansas and completed postdoctoral training at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. He has led research programs at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, the University of Vermont, and the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences. He currently leads NIH-funded research programs at the Virginia Tech Carilion Research Institute. He is the recipient of numerous awards and honors including the 2016 Nathan B. Eddy Award for outstanding research. Dr. Bickel has co-edited five books and published over 400 papers and chapters. His work is frequently cited and receives national and international recognition.

Samuel McClure, Ph.D., is an associate professor of psychology at Arizona State University. He completed his Ph.D. in neuroscience at Baylor College of Medicine before working as a postdoctoral fellow in the psychology department at Princeton University. Prior to moving to Arizona State, Dr. McClure was an assistant professor of psychology at Stanford University. Dr. McClure’s research blends computational modeling with behavioral and neuroimaging methods to study reward processing and decision-making in people. He performed some of the initial research showing that reward learning signals can be tracking in people using fMRI. A large component of his research has investigated how impulsivity arises from the interaction of brain reward systems with executive control processes. Dr. McClure has enjoyed a long collaboration with Dr. Bickel in which the two have applied some of Dr. McClure’s findings on the neural and behavioral basis of impulsivity to clinical self-control disorders.