Nora Volkow
| Nora Volkow | |
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Nora Volkow in 2013.
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27 March 1956 Mexico City, Mexico |
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| Spouse | Stephen Adler |
Nora Volkow (born 27 March 1956) is a Mexican-born naturalized American psychiatrist. She is currently the director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), which is part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH).
Volkow is the first person from the NIH to visit the Dalai Lama at his residence in Dharamsala, HP, India. During this 2013 visit, Dr. Volkow took part in a dialogue with the Dalai Lama about addiction science, as part of a five-day conference sponsored by the Mind and Life Institute.
In 2014, Volkow was a featured speaker at TEDMED, the annual multi-disciplinary gathering where leaders from all sectors of society come together to explore the promise of technology and potential of human achievement in health and medicine. Dr. Volkow's talk focused on the parallels between compulsive overeating and drug addiction.
Volkow earned her bachelor's degree from the Modern American School, then earned a medical degree from National University of Mexico before going to New York University for psychiatric residency. She chose a career in brain research after reading an article on the use of positron emission tomography in studying brain function. She did research at Brookhaven National Laboratory before becoming director of NIDA in 2003.
Volkow's imaging studies of the brains of people addicted to drugs have helped to clarify the mechanisms of drug addiction. At Brookhaven, positron emission tomography (PET) scanning was being used to study the brain in people with schizophrenia. When Volkow moved to the University of Texas, studying patients with schizophrenia was not an option, but studying patients with cocaine addiction was possible. Volkow and colleagues studied the distribution of blood flow in the brain of chronic cocaine users and control patients who did use cocaine. They found decreased blood flow to the prefrontal cortex of cocaine users, that continued after 10 days of withdrawal from cocaine use.
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