For decades, a frustrating pattern has played out in addiction neuroscience: females were basically ignored, not even included in the studies. Then, thanks to the NIH SABV mandates almost exactly 10 years ago, researchers all over the country started including females, and things started getting intriguing, with some evidence suggesting that the estrus cycle may influence the motivation to take cocaine. Our lab just published a paper in Psychopharmacology, led by Dr. Elizabe

We’ve all heard stories about the opioid crisis, but one of the biggest mysteries remains: why can two people take the same dose of a painkiller, yet only one of them ends up struggling with addiction? While we know that individual risk varies wildly, identifying why one person transitions to dependency while another remains resilient is incredibly difficult because human lives are full of outside influences. In our latest study published in Neuropsychopharmacology , we condu

Why do some people become addicted to cocaine more quickly than others? For decades, scientists have debated whether addiction is driven by sensitization of the psychomotor effect of the drug (getting a bigger effect of the drug over time), sensitization of the motivational effects of the cues (incentive salience) or tolerance to the psychomotor effect of the drug (needing more of the drug to get the same effect). Our latest study using advanced machine vision and genetica