About Me
Cynthia S. Pomerleau, Ph.D.
From 1985 until my retirement in 2009, I worked in the University of Michigan Department of Psychiatry as a Research Professor and as Director of the Nicotine Research Laboratory. Along with my husband and collaborator, Ovide Pomerleau, I carried out a program of research on smoking and nicotine dependence that included
A particular focus of my own research was on concerns about postcessation weight gain as a barrier to quitting, the effects of smoking and quitting on body mass and body shape, and the relationship between smoking and disordered eating. Over the years, I was awarded several grants by public and private funding agencies, including the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, the Institute for Research on Women and Gender, and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, to pursue this work. My self-help book Life After Cigarettes (Hunter House Publishers, now a subsidiary of Turner Publishing) directly targets women smokers who want to quit but harbor deep concerns about postcessation weight gain and depression. In this volume, findings from my research are translated into an evidence-based motivational and behavioral program for overcoming these barriers. Importantly, the book does not promise the reader that she will be able to quit without gaining weight, a goal that few can achieve; rather, it helps her to become comfortable with a modest weight gain and teaches her to avoid having her weight spin out of control. The book's website includes an archived blog that offers extensive additional material relevant to the topic of food and tobacco.
As a practicing scientist, most of my work of necessity centered on the need to meet our obligations to our funding sources to collect data and disseminate our findings to the scientific community. It was difficult to find the blocks of time and quietness of mind needed to step back and look at the larger picture, and to explore areas of knowledge outside those in which I could reasonably hope to claim in-depth expertise. Now that I am officially "active emerita," I am no longer subject to these constraints. This website and its associated blog are my retirement project, my effort to pull together a broad range of findings on the competing demands of food and tobacco in all their complexity, in the body and around the globe.
Cindy Pomerleau
Ann Arbor, Michigan
- demonstration and subsequent validation of nicotine’s euphoric effects
- systematic studies of smoking and menstrual phase interactions
- research on psychiatric cofactors for smoking (including adult attention deficit disorder, depression)
- effects of long-term use of nicotine replacement products in improving abstinence rates
- research on the importance of positive and negative early experiences with smoking in driving subsequent smoking history
- characterization of smoking phenotypes based on patterns of withdrawal symptomatology
- development of a new model for examining differences in the reinforcement potential of nicotine based on comparisons of never-smokers with positive vs. negative family smoking histories
- studies on the genetics of smoking, with an emphasis on the importance of complex phenotypes in refining our understanding of the strong heritability of smoking and tobacco dependence
A particular focus of my own research was on concerns about postcessation weight gain as a barrier to quitting, the effects of smoking and quitting on body mass and body shape, and the relationship between smoking and disordered eating. Over the years, I was awarded several grants by public and private funding agencies, including the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, the Institute for Research on Women and Gender, and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, to pursue this work. My self-help book Life After Cigarettes (Hunter House Publishers, now a subsidiary of Turner Publishing) directly targets women smokers who want to quit but harbor deep concerns about postcessation weight gain and depression. In this volume, findings from my research are translated into an evidence-based motivational and behavioral program for overcoming these barriers. Importantly, the book does not promise the reader that she will be able to quit without gaining weight, a goal that few can achieve; rather, it helps her to become comfortable with a modest weight gain and teaches her to avoid having her weight spin out of control. The book's website includes an archived blog that offers extensive additional material relevant to the topic of food and tobacco.
As a practicing scientist, most of my work of necessity centered on the need to meet our obligations to our funding sources to collect data and disseminate our findings to the scientific community. It was difficult to find the blocks of time and quietness of mind needed to step back and look at the larger picture, and to explore areas of knowledge outside those in which I could reasonably hope to claim in-depth expertise. Now that I am officially "active emerita," I am no longer subject to these constraints. This website and its associated blog are my retirement project, my effort to pull together a broad range of findings on the competing demands of food and tobacco in all their complexity, in the body and around the globe.
Cindy Pomerleau
Ann Arbor, Michigan