Olivier George, PhD

Olivier George, PhD, is a Professor at the University of California San Diego, School of Medicine, in the Department of Psychiatry. He serves as Co-Director of the Animal Core of the Scripps Research Alcohol Research Center and Director of the Cocaine and Oxycodone Biobanks, and teaches for the departments of Psychology, Psychiatry, and Pharmacy at UC San Diego.

Dr. George received his BS, MS, and PhD from the University of Bordeaux (France), where he worked with Drs. Michel Le Moal, Pier Vincenzo Piazza, and Willy Mayo on the role of cholinergic neurons in age-related sleep and memory impairments. He conducted postdoctoral work on animal models of addiction at The Scripps Research Institute with Dr. George Koob before joining the faculty in 2013, and moved his laboratory to UC San Diego in 2019.

He has studied alcohol, nicotine, and drug addiction for more than 15 years. His postdoctoral studies were the first to identify the role of corticotropin-releasing factor in escalation of nicotine self-administration and demonstrated that escalation of cocaine, methamphetamine, and alcohol intake produces prefrontal cortex dysfunction leading to cognitive impairment. He has made breakthrough discoveries including identifying the neuronal ensembles of alcohol and nicotine addiction and discovering a novel neuronal population that drives negative emotional states in nicotine addiction, and he pioneered novel animal models of nicotine, opioid, and alcohol addiction using electronic-cigarette vapor self-administration.

His recent work focuses on unveiling the genetic basis of addiction and identifying brain-wide functional architecture remodeling in addiction using single-cell whole-brain imaging. He has contributed to the development of several Investigational New Drugs, holds several patents, has given over 115 talks, and has published more than 120 peer-reviewed papers. His work has been supported by the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA), the Tobacco-Related Disease Research Program (TRDRP), the W. M. Keck Foundation, the Kavli Institute for Brain and Mind, and industry partners.