The American Association of Wine Economists (AAWE) and the wine economics community were saddened to learn of the passing of Dr. Domenic Cicchetti, on June 30, 2019. He was 82 years old.
Domenic Cicchetti was born on August 22, 1937. He earned his B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. in social psychology and biostatistics from the University of Connecticut (1965). He was a Senior Research Scientist at the Yale School of Medicine in the Child Study Center and the Department of Psychiatry and the School of Public Health in the Department of Epidemiology. He was an adjunct professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Windsor, in Windsor, Ontario, Canada.
Dr. Cicchetti (Dom) was a renowned biostatistics scholar. Together with his late wife, Sara Sparrow, he developed the Vineland Adaptive Behavior Scales, which became the world's leading instrument for supporting the diagnosis of intellectual and developmental disabilities. He authored and/or co-authored more than 200 research publications in behavioral and biomedical research, computer science, and biostatistics and wine statistics. For the Journal of Wine Economics, Dom authored five research articles and three book reviews. His works have been cited more than 40,000 times.
He has been a member of AAWE from the very beginning and was instrumental in the development of statistical analyses of wine tasting. I fondly remember my first encounter with Dom and Sara, over oysters and wine, after a wine economics conference in Bordeaux in 2005. He laid out the basics of a biometrical analysis of the 1976 Judgment of Paris tasting, which would become the harbinger of a series of papers by Dom and others, mostly published in the Journal of Wine Economics.
Dom received numerous academic honors. Among others, Dom and Sara received the first Connecticut Psychological Association's Award for Distinguished Effort by a Connecticut psychologist in 1984. Dom was an elected Fellow in Division 5 of the American Statistical Association (Evaluation, Measurement, and Statistics). In 2013, he also became an elected Fellow of the AAWE.
The AAWE and its members miss Dom greatly. As a regular attendee and contributor to AAWE conferences all over the world, for example, in Bordeaux, Reims, Portland, and Padua, he was involved in various academic collaborations. Lastly, he also was a dear friend to many of us and will not be forgotten.
