Image Bank: Spokesperson Portraits and Bios

Gary E. Swan, Ph.D.

Director, Center for Health Sciences

Expertise: Addiction, Aging, Behavior Genetics, Health Psychology

Gary Swan, Ph.D., has been involved in research at SRI for nearly 30 years, serving as the director of the Center for Health Sciences since 1987. His research areas include treatment of nicotine dependence, genetic and environmental determinants of addiction and disease, brain aging, and pharmacogenetics.

Swan has been the principal investigator or co-investigator for more than 20 NIH-funded grants. He is currently examining genetic factors for predisposition to tobacco dependence, response to pharmacological treatments for tobacco dependence, and cognitive decline in older adults. He is also the principal investigator of an NIH study on the effects of smoking cessation and related treatments on sleep.

Prior to working at SRI, he was a clinical instructor in the Department of Psychiatry at Stanford Medical Center. Dr. Swan also served as the editor-in-chief of Nicotine & Tobacco Research for eight years and has published more than 185 manuscripts in peer-reviewed journals such as Addiction, the Journal of the American Medical Association and Neurology. Dr. Swan received his Ph.D. in psychology from the State University of New York at Stony Brook. In 2011, he was elected president of the Society for Research on Nicotine and Tobacco.

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