Nora Volkow

Nora Volkow, born in 1956, is a Mexican-American psychiatrist who has directed the National Institute on Drug Abuse, part of the United States National Institutes of Health, since 2003. Born in Mexico City and trained in medicine at the National University of Mexico, she completed her psychiatry training at New York University, where she began using positron emission tomography to look at the living brain. Her imaging work at the University of Texas and later at Brookhaven National Laboratory showed reduced blood flow in the prefrontal cortex of chronic cocaine users, findings that helped shift public thinking about drug addiction away from moral failure and toward a disease of brain circuitry. At the institute she has pressed for policies that address stigma, health disparities and the criminalization of drug use.