Nora Volkow

Nora Volkow is married to Dr. Stephen Adler, a physicist at the ‘National Cancer Institute.’

Nora Volkow was born on March 27, 1956, in Mexico City, Mexico, to a pharmaceutical father and a fashion-designer mother. Her family history is very interesting. Nora happens to be the great-granddaughter of Leon Trotsky, a popular Russian revolutionary leader who stood against Stalin. Stalin, after coming into power, had him exiled from his country. Nora’s father arrived in Mexico and started living in the same house where his grandfather had died.

Nora had three sisters and the family grew up in the same house where Leon was killed in 1940 by Russian nationalist forces. The house was later turned into the ‘Leon Trotsky House Museum’ and was subsequently thrown open to tourists. As teenagers, Nora and his sisters would often show tourists around the house.

Nora finished her high school from the ‘Modern American School,’ a local school in New Mexico. Always interested in the medical field, she then joined the ‘National University of Mexico,’ where she completed her undergraduate studies in medicine. She then moved to the US and enrolled herself at the ‘New York University,’ where she began her psychiatric residency.

She then became interested in the field of brain research, as she believed there was still a lot to be done in that area. She was overwhelmed by the new developments in the field. The concept of positron emission tomography (PET) interested her. Upon reading an article about it, she finally decided to pursue a career in brain research, focusing particularly on the effects of substance addiction on the human brain.

Nora started her research work at the ‘Brookhaven National Laboratory’ and stayed there for a few years before she started working at the ‘NIDA,’ eventually becoming its director in 2003.

One of the most path-breaking studies that Nora conducted was geared toward determining the impact of addiction on the human brain. She performed imaging studies on the brains of addicts to reach a conclusion on the mechanisms of drug addiction. At Brookhaven, in New York, PET scanning was being used to study mental illnesses such as schizophrenia.

She moved to the ‘University of Texas’ to further her research in the field. There, she began studying cocaine addicts.

The main focus of her research was to determine how different an addict’s brain was from that of a non-addict. She and her colleagues found out that the flow of blood to the prefrontal cortex was significantly reduced in the brains of cocaine addicts. A more shocking revelation was that the blood flow did not become normal even after 10 days of withdrawal from the substance.

The findings by Nora and her team were highly rewarding for addicts, who were maligned by society for being morally flawed. The studies proved that addiction resulted in certain changes in the human brain that made the addict crave the substance again. The studies further established that the reduced blood flow to the prefrontal cortex of the brain caused certain pathological changes in the brain that made it hard for an addict to give up the substance completely.