Theodore J. Cicero, Ph.D.

Theodore J. Cicero, Ph.D., is the John P. Feighner Professor of Psychiatry at Washington University School of Medicine. After receiving his Ph.D. in 1968 from Purdue University, he joined Washington University’s faculty as an assistant professor in 1970. Cicero has published more than two hundred scientific articles in the general area of substance abuse research. Much of his work has focused on neurobiological substrates of dependence and abuse of drugs (opiates and alcohol) in animal models. Over the past fifteen years, Cicero’s focus has been on the epidemiology of opiate abuse, beginning with the emergence of the prescription drug problem in the 1990s and continuing with the recent transition of heroin abuse from an inner-city problem most common in poor, minority males to an epidemic in white, middle-class male and female residents of suburban and rural locations.