Dr. Sterling McPherson earned his PhD in 2010 in Experimental Psychology (with an Applied Quantitative Methods minor), and then completed a Postdoctoral Fellowship in Behavioral Pharmacology. Since then, he has secured more than $80M in grants and contracts as Principal Investigator or Co-Investigator from 11 NIH institutes/centers and 16 other sponsors. He was competitively chosen to become an NIH Fellow of the Summer Institute on Randomized Clinical Trials in 2014. This is also the year when he began his own independent research program, the Analytics and PsychoPharmacology Laboratory (APPL), which has grown to more than 20 people. He uses pharmacological, behavioral, and technological solutions to develop therapeutics primarily for substance use disorders in early phase (I/II) clinical trials. He has collaborated recently with five different industry sponsors (Optum, Pillsy, Managed Health Connections, Intent Solutions and Ringful Health) on technology-enhanced addiction treatment and treatment adherence platforms. In 2020, he was awarded the Joseph Cochin Young Investigator Award from his field’s premier international addiction science research society, the College on Problems of Drug Dependence, and is currently on its Board of Directors. He was also elected to the Washington State Academy of Sciences in 2020. He has active collaborations across eight countries. He has also reviewed for more than 30 journals from diverse fields and is the Associate Editor at Drug and Alcohol Dependence Reports and the American Journal of Drug and Alcohol Abuse. He is also a Senior Editor/Deputy Statistical Editor at Addiction. He has served on several NIH study sections for over 10 years and is currently the Chair for a standing study section at the Center of Scientific Review at NIH. He maintains a strong track record of more than 150 peer-reviewed publications, and over 200 oral presentations globally.
