Intended Audience
The neuroscience program welcomes Dr. Marco Venniro as the final speaker in the 2022-23 Neuroscience Seminar Series. HIs topic: "Reverse translation to study substance use disorders and identify new brain mechanisms."
Dr. Marco Venniro is an assistant professor in the Department of Anatomy and Neurobiology at the University of Maryland School of Medicine who holds a secondary appointment in the Department of Psychiatry. He is interested in behavior and translational research with a focus on the social component of neuropsychiatric disorders. He is particularly interested in understanding how alternative non-drug rewards can be used to control and treat drug addiction with a focus on social reward. Dr. Venniro is now working to adapt his recently published social-choice operant model to study the neural mechanisms governing social behavior, drug addiction, and other neuropsychiatric disorders.
"The goal of our research, and of the addiction field in general, has not merely been to identify neuropharmacological and circuit mechanisms of drug addiction and relapse. The goal was to achieve prospective predictive validity—the ability to identify new treatments. As I will describe in the lecture, the classical relapse model inits traditional form has not appreciably changed the options available to patients in need of relapse prevention. This shortcoming is not unique to relapse, but it is an increasing source of disappointment, and it calls for a regrouping."