Drug abuse and addiction have an enormous negative impact on society. The past decade has seen exciting developments in the ability to probe and measure brain function both in humans and in model organisms. However these findings often do not move beyond the species of interest, suggesting one of the barriers to the field is that these communities of researchers do not robustly engage with one another. The goal of this meeting is to bring together top addiction researchers who study humans, non-human primates and rodents to identify the most critical and tractable problems of addiction. The goal of this interdisciplinary meeting is to enable more rigorous translational and reverse translational science that will lead to both better understanding of the neurobiology of reward and addiction and to more effective treatments for addiction. 

Co-Organizer, and Director of the Bowles Center for Alcohol Studies and John Andrews Distinguished Professor in the Department of Pharmacology at the UNC School of Medicine, Thomas Kash, talks about why you should attend this meeting in the video below: