On October 3, 2011, Mexican-American psychiatrist Nora Volkow was named one of “Washington’s 100 Most Powerful Women” by Washingtonian magazine, in the category of health and medicine. Volkow’s work focuses mainly on the role of dopamine in brain regions involved with reward and self-control. She was the first to use brain imaging to explore how substance abuse affects the brain, and her work has played an integral role in depicting how drug addiction is a neurological disorder. 

Volkow was born on March 27, 1956, in Mexico City. She grew up in Coyoacán with her three sisters. She received her medical degree at the National University of Mexico and did postdoctoral training in psychiatry at New York University. Part of Volkow’s motivation for studying the role of addiction perhaps stems from her familial history; unable to escape from his debilitating alcoholism, her grandfather eventually took his own life. 

Most of Volkow’s career was spent at the Brookhaven National Laboratory, where she worked her way up from researcher, to Director of Nuclear Medicine, to Director of the Regional Neuroimaging Center, to Associate Director for Life Sciences. At Brookhaven, she studied the brains of people with schizophrenia. She later worked at the University of Texas Medical School, where she continued her focus on PET scan research (this time with a focus on cocaine addiction). There, she also took on a clinical role, working with patients suffering from addiction. Volkow was also a professor of psychiatry at Stony Brook University and served as Associate Dean of the University's medical school. In 2003 she became Director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), an organization within the National Institutes of Health that is the lead federal agency for research on drug use and addiction. Volkow has published over 800 peer-reviewed articles. 

After being honored on Washingtonian’s list of “Washington’s 100 Most Powerful Women,” Volkow gave a Ted Talk in 2014. Called “Why do our brain’s get addicted?”, the talk explores dopamine’s role in food addiction and the obesity epidemic. Volkow’s work helps remove the stigma associated with addiction.  

Sources:  

“Biography of Dr. Nora Volkow.” National Institutes of Health. U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, December 13, 2022. https://nida.nih.gov/about-nida/directors-page/biography-dr-nora-volkow.  

Milk, Leslie Milk. “Washington's 100 Most Powerful Women.” Washingtonian, October 3, 2011. https://www.washingtonian.com/2011/10/03/washingtons-100-most-powerful-women/.  

“Nora Volkow.” Wikipedia, January 30, 2023. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nora_Volkow.  

Volkow, Nora. “Why Do Our Brains Get Addicted?” TEDMED. Accessed March 5, 2023. https://www.tedmed.com/talks/show?id=309096.