Joseph W. Cullen Memorial Award Lecture. Paving the road from basic research to policy: cigarette smoking as a prototype issue for cancer control science.

The American Society of Preventive Oncology’s Joseph W. Cu/len Memorial Award was created to memorialize Dr. Cu/len’s unparalleled contributions to national tobacco control, particularly as Program Coordinator for the National Cancer Institute’s Smoking, Tobacco, and Cancer Program from 1982 to 1989. The award was created to recognize distinguished achievement in continued national tobacco control efforts through research, the development of prevention and cessation programs with wide-ranging public health impact, and public policy and advocacy initiatives. Ellen Gritz received the first Joseph W. Cu/len Memorial Award on March 15, 1 992, at the American Society of Preventive Oncology’s annual meeting in Bethesda, Maryland. Dr. Gritz’s curriculum vitae is extensive and impressive and a testament to her phenomenal energy, hard work, productivity, and breadth of vision and expertise. It includes almost 100 publications and over 75 papers and presentations. From 1980 to 1986, Dr. Critz served as Behavioral Editor for six annual Surgeon General’s Reports-reports which served not only to summarize but also to shape the tobacco control research and accomplishments of the past decade. She has served as consultant or expert advisor to a range of federal agencies and voluntary organizations, including the American Cancer Society; the National Institute on Drug Abuse; the National Cancer Institute; the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute; the Center for Disease Control’s Office on Smoking and Health; the Kennedy Institute for the Study of Smoking Behavior and Policy; and the Advocacy Institute’s Women versus Smoking Network. She is a member of the Cancer Control Research Committee of the Southwest Oncology Group and Chair of its Behavioral Science Subcommittee. She is an Associate Editor of Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers & Prevention, a consulting editor for Health Psychology, and a reviewer or editorial advisory board member for 10 other journals. She is currently Director of the Division of Cancer Control at the Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center and Professor in Residence in UCLA’s Department of Surgery, Head and Neck Division. Dr. Gritz’s research over the past 20 years spans the whole field of tobacco control, from biology to community. And in each area, she has been a leader, a catalyst, and a mentor for others. Her earliest work was in the area of the psychopharmacology of smoking-clarifying the role of biobehavioral factors in smoking initiation, maintenance, and cessation. Dr. Gritz was one of the seminal proponents of smoking as nicotine addiction and participated in some of the earliest research conducted in this country on nicotine replacement as a pharmocological aid to cessation. Her 1979 landmark paper on women and smoking defined the major questions in this area and paved the way for the 1980 Surgeon General’s Report on Women and Smoking, a report which she coauthored. She remains the foremost authority on women’s smoking in the United States, with research addressing a range of topics from understanding onset among teenaged girls to developing and evaluating innovative cessation treatments for pregnant women and for nurses. She has done similar pioneering work in smokeless tobacco use, unaided smoking cessation, smoking among hospitalized medical and psychiatric patients, and in the development of community-based interventions to reach minority populations as well as innovative work to develop smoking cessation programs for head and neck cancer patients.