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Paul Marques, PhD, Behavioral Physiology/Psychopharmacology
Senior Research Scientist II
The Calverton Center
Calverton, Maryland

Phone: (301) 755-2723
Fax: (301) 755-2799
Email: marques@pire.org


Paul R. Marques’ current interests and expertise involve mechanisms and technologies suited to the control and monitoring of alcohol and drug use that threaten the public. The current focus of his work involves the use of biological markers of alcohol use that can be recovered from blood, hair and urine. Measurement of these markers from convicted DWI driving offenders who are required to use alcohol ignition interlock devices has formed the basis for two objective and independent sources of public risk exposure information. His current research is attempting to further understand these relationships and to push these discoveries out of the laboratory into current practices.

His involvement with these topics took a circuitous route after earlier training in central nervous system drug actions, neuroendocrine regulation, and other homeostatic processes. His Ph.D. topic (1973) was drug dependence research in animal models at the University of Arizona followed by 5 postdoctoral years at the University of Washington Departments of Medicine, and of Physiology & Biophysics, and the NIH Regional Primate Center.

Marques joined a division of PIRE (NPSRI) in 1988, an environment that had a rich complement of expertise in public health and safety research. In these areas, Marques' established expertise with research awards related to perinatal drug exposure studies, long-term child neurobehavioral and educational outcomes following prenatal exposure, many studies of alcohol ignition interlock devices effectiveness, blood biomarkers of alcohol consumption, adolescent drug-involvement, alcohol impairment estimation, field-sobriety evaluation studies, treatment outcome studies, technical approaches to monitoring drug exposure, hair analysis of drugs and alcohol, treatment retention and long-term follow-up, alcohol managed care, and development and evaluation of computer-conversion of risk assessment screening tools.

In the past 5 years, projects have included: evaluation of electrochemical transdermal alcohol monitoring devices, hangover and fatigue effects on paramedic rescue skills; interlocks on motorcycles, a multinational project involving laboratories in the US, Canada, Sweden, Germany and Luxembourg predicting driver alcohol risk profiles based on convergence of blood, urine and hair alcohol biomarkers, BAC tests in the interlock record, and psychometric assessments.

Marques’ research has been supported by NIDA, NIAAA, RWJ and NHTSA. He is a member of the Executive Board of ICADTS (International Council of Alcohol Drugs and Traffic Safety) where he also chairs the Working Group on Ignition Interlocks and co-chairs the group on Alcohol Biomarkers. In addition, he holds membership in AAAS, RSA, CPDD, and the NRC's Transportation Research Board (TRB) Committee on Alcohol and Drugs. In 2007 Paul was awarded the annual Hingson Research to Practice Award from Mothers Against Drunk Driving. He has approximately 100 publications in the scientific literatures.


Last Modified: 5/21/2012
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