2016 Peter Glass Academic Research Evening
Tuesday, May 10, 2016
3:30 pm to 8:00 pm
Wang Center
Nora Volkow, MD will be the keynote speaker at this year’s Dr. Peter S.A. Glass Academic Research Evening. Dr. Volkow has been the Director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) at the National Institutes of Health since May 2003.
Dr. Volkow's research uses brain imaging techniques to study what happens to the brains of people who use drugs of abuse. She has shown that the drugs lead to changes in many brain pathways include the dopamine system. These changes are involved with human motivation, drive, and pleasure in addiction. As a result of Dr. Volkow's investigations, we now view drug addiction as a disease of the brain.
Dr. Volkow was born in Mexico, attended the Modern American School, and earned her medical degree from the National University of Mexico in Mexico City, where she received the Robins award for best medical student of her generation. Her psychiatric residency was at New York University, where she earned the Laughlin Fellowship Award as one of the 10 Outstanding Psychiatric Residents in the USA. Following this, she joined the Medical Department at Brookhaven National Lab. In addition to her research with the brain imaging tools that were available at BNL, she held several leadership positions there including Chairman of the Medical Department, and Associate Director for Life Sciences. Dr. Volkow also was a Professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Associate Dean of the Medical School at Stony Brook University.
Dr. Volkow has published more than 600 peer-reviewed articles and written more than 95 book chapters and non-peer-reviewed manuscripts, and has also edited three books on neuroimaging for mental and addictive disorders. In 2013, she was a Samuel J. Heyman Service to America Medal (Sammies) finalist; and she was inducted into the Children and Adults with Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (CHADD) Hall of Fame. She was elected to membership in the Institute of Medicine in the National Academy of Sciences and received the International Prize from the French Institute of Health and Medical Research for her pioneering work in brain imaging and addiction science.
We are very honored and fortunate that Dr. Volkow will be the keynote speaker at our Academic Research Evening! She will speak on:
"Collision of Pain & Opioid Epidemics: Challenges and Solutions"
