Mark Bicket, MD, PhD, FASA, will receive the ASRA Pain Medicine Presidential Scholar Award at the 23rd Annual Pain Medicine Meeting being held November 21-23, 2024, in Las Vegas, NV. The award is given biannually to recognize outstanding scientific and sustained contributions to regional anesthesia, acute, or chronic pain medicine over the preceding 10 years.
Describing him as an “internationally recognized academic figure in the field of pain medicine,” Christopher L. Wu, MD, a clinical professor of anesthesiology at Hospital for Special Surgery and Weill Cornell Medicine, claimed Dr. Bicket “epitomizes, at the highest level, the standards for the Presidential Scholar Award… his research has had a meaningful impact on the clinical practice and scientific direction of our specialty and society.”
An associate professor of anesthesiology and health management and policy at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, Dr. Bicket also codirects the Overdose Prevention Engagement Network and is the director of pain and opioid research at the university.
An active member of ASRA Pain Medicine, Dr. Bicket received the Society’s Resident/Fellow of the Year Award in 2015, has served on multiple committees, and currently serves as associate editor for Regional Anesthesia and Pain Medicine.
“He is a skilled clinician and passionate educator,” said nominator Chad M. Brummett, MD, senior associate chair for research and professor at the University of Michigan. “He has made countless important contributions to research, health policy, and the ASRA [Pain Medicine] community… I can think of no one more deserving of the Presidential Scholar Award.”
After earning bachelors’ degrees in economics and mathematics at the University of Oklahoma in Norman, Dr. Bicket went on to obtain his MD and PhD from Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, MD. He served his anesthesiology residency at Johns Hopkins and a clinical fellowship in pain medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. In 2019 and 2020, he served a fellowship with the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. In that role, he led efforts to finalize and publish “Health Research and Development to Stem the Opioid Crisis: A National Roadmap,” which coordinated research plans across 17 government entities.
His extensive experience also includes serving on two National Academy of Medicine committees related to opioids and acute pain and service as a voting member on the Food and Drug Administration’s Anesthetic and Analgesic Drug Products Advisory Committee, which evaluates all new analgesic drug products.
A frequent speaker and author, Dr. Bicket’s research interests include optimizing pain management for acute and chronic pain conditions including clinical trials, health services, policy analysis, pharmacoepidemiology, and systematic review/meta-analysis. He co-leads two pragmatic clinical trials sponsored by the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute examining analgesic prescribing after surgery and three other R01 projects funded by the National Institute of Drug Abuse to improve the care of surgical patients taking prescription opioids and those with opioid use disorder.
The Presidential Scholar Award is for recognition of an individual’s work. Nominees must be actively involved in research, academically accomplished, have a track record of high impact publication, and have built a significant body of work on a topic relevant to regional anesthesia and/or pain medicine. The award is open to ASRA Pain Medicine members only.
