Upcoming ENIGMA & Related Events

Sex Differences in Addiction: An International Consensus Workshop

Virtually | 27 September, 2024

We are excited to announce the Sex Differences in Addiction: An International Consensus Workshop.

Organised in conjunction with the Neuroscience of Addiction and Mental Health Program at ACU’s Healthy Brain and Mind Research Centre, experts from the National Institute on Drug Abuse, and the ENIGMA Consortium.

Join us as we map key results and challenges in the study of sex differences in addiction and form an expert consensus framework to study sex differences in addiction and move the field forward!

When: Friday, 27 September, 2024 (13:00 – 16:30 PDT, alt timezones)
Where: Online via Zoom
What: The workshop will feature presentations from international experts from NIDA, ENIGMA and other organisations addressing:
- Neurobiology, cognition & genetics
- Females across the lifespan
- Strategies for recruitment and stigma
- Implications for public health
Concluding with an interactive panel discussion between workshop attendees and presenters to form a consensus framework on the key metrics required to progress our understanding of sex-differences in the field of addiction.

REGISTRATION IS OPEN: https://forms.gle/8P8qAvWhdWedFkip8

Stay tuned! See schedule below. A detailed agenda will be disseminated closer to the workshop date.

Speakers:

Opening Remarks
			A/Prof Valentina Lorenzetti, Australian Catholic University. Dr Valentina Lorenzetti has achieved a Master’s in Psychology at University of Bologna (2007) and a PhD at The University of Melbourne (2012). She has undergone postdoctoral training at Monash (Australia 2012-2015), University of Rio (Brazil, 2015) & University of Liverpool (England, 2016-2017). She is now Associate Professor at the Australian Catholic University (2018-current). Valentina is founding Lead of the Neuroscience of Addiction & Mental Health Program, co-founding Deputy Director of the Healthy Brain and Mind Research Centre, and Senior Editor of the journal Addiction. Her research aims to unpack the onset, vulnerability to, and recovery from brain and mental health harms in substance use and related problems; including to study sex differences in alcohol and cannabis use and dependence. This is achieved by combining advanced multimodal neuroimaging tools, global multi-site cohorts (e.g., ENIGMA Addiction, IMAGEN); new interventions (e.g., cannabidiol, mindfulness, real-time fMRI based neurofeedback); and developing metrics of cannabis exposure, including the Standard THC Unit and the international cannabis toolkit.

			Prof Rita Valentino, National Institute on Drug Abuse. Rita J. Valentino, Ph.D. is the Director of the Division of Neuroscience and Behavior at the National Institute on Drug Abuse. She received a BS degree from the University of Rhode Island School of Pharmacy and a Ph.D. in Pharmacology from the University of Michigan. After postdoctoral fellowships at the University of North Carolina and the Salk Institute, she went on to faculty positions from 1983-2017 in the Department of Pharmacology at George Washington University, Department of Mental Health Sciences at Hahnemann University and Department of Anesthesiology and Critical Care Medicine at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and University of Pennsylvania. Dr. Valentino’s research has focused on the neurobiology of stress. Her laboratory provided convergent evidence that the stress-related neuropeptide, corticotropin-releasing factor (CRF) serves as a neurotransmitter to modulate the activity of major brain biogenic amine systems that have been implicated in psychiatric disorders, thereby providing a window into how stress influences vulnerability to these diseases. Her laboratory was the first to demonstrate that receptors could signal and be trafficked in a sex-biased manner. These sex differences provide a molecular mechanism for increased vulnerability of females to stress-related neuropsychiatric disorders. Dr. Valentino has been the recipient of several awards including a 2021 NIH Director’s Award for scientific leadership and vision. She was recently selected as a Fellow of the American Society of Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics. She is a Fellow and current Secretary of the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology, a member of the Scientific Board of the Brain Behavior Research Foundation (formerly NARSAD) and the Founding Editor-in-Chief of Neurobiology of Stress.
			Prof Sunila Nair, National Institute on Drug Abuse. Dr. Sunila Nair is a Program Officer in the Division of Neuroscience and Behavior and Co-chair of the Women and Sex/Gender Differences Workgroup at the National Institute on Drug Abuse at the NIH. Her programmatic portfolio is targeted at understanding how the functional activity of cells and circuits in the brain is controlled and altered in response to addictive drugs and sex differences in substance use disorders.

Sex differences: Cognition, neurocircuitry & genetics
			A/Prof Elvisha Dhamala, Feinstein Institutes for Medical Research. Elvisha Dhamala, PhD is an Assistant Professor at the Feinstein Institutes for Medical Research and the Zucker Hillside Hospital and the PI of the Brain-Based Predictive Modeling Laboratory. She earned her BSc in Neuroscience from McGill University, and her PhD in Neuroscience from Weill Cornell Medicine in the CoCo (Computational Connectomics) Lab. She completed her postdoctoral training as the inaugural Kavli Institute for Neuroscience Postdoctoral Fellow for Academic Diversity in the Holmes Lab at Yale University. Her research program is focused on characterizing the influences of sex and gender on the neurobiological underpinnings of human behaviour across healthy and clinical populations. She is especially interested in understanding how different aspects of brain, behaviour, and brain-behaviour relationships vary across sexes and genders, and whether those differences underlie the unique presentations of psychiatric illnesses.

			A/Prof Erin Calipari, Vanderbilt University. Dr. Calipari is the Director of the Vanderbilt Center for Addiction Research and an Associate Professor in the Department of Pharmacology at Vanderbilt University. Her work focuses on understanding how sex differences in brain function make women particularly vulnerable to substance use disorder. Over her career she has published over 95 peer-reviewed research articles and reviews on these topics. She is also an active member of the research community serving on executive committees and boards for several societies and as associate editor for multiple journals. Dr. Calipari’s work is funded by multiple grants from the national institute on drug abuse (NIDA) and the national institute on alcohol abuse and alcoholism (NIAAA), as well as from several foundations. Dr. Calipari is also an advocate for underrepresented groups in science and serves on a number of committees and participates in groups that are focused on fighting bias in the scientific community and providing support for marginalized individuals to advance in scientific careers.

			A/ Prof Deena Walker, Oregon Health and Science University. Deena Walker is an assistant professor in the Department of behavioral Neuroscience at Oregon Health & Science University. She is passionate about understanding how hormones influence the brain and behavior and is dedicated to using her diverse training background to identify precision-based treatments for neuropsychiatric disorders, particularly in women. Currently, her lab is focused on how hormones influence sex-specific vulnerability in substance/alcohol use disorder. She recently moved to Portland in 2020 after doing her postdoctoral fellowship at Icahn School of Medicine at Mt. Sinai where she studied the molecular mechanisms of sex differences in addiction. As a PhD student at The University of Texas at Austin, she studied how the brain controls ovulation and menopause with a specific focus on hormonal regulation of gene expression. In recognition of her innovative and impactful science, she has been awarded several early career awards, including the prestigious Frank A. Beach Early Career Investigator Award from the Society for Behavioral Neuroendocrinology in 2023. In addition to her laboratory work, Dr. Walker is active in science outreach and storytelling. Her stories about the impact of her own life experiences on her science have been featured on the podcast StoryCollider.

			Prof Debra Bangasser, Georgia State University. Dr. Debra Bangasser is a Professor of Neuroscience, Georgia Research Alliance Distinguished Investigator, and Director of the Center for Behavioral Neuroscience at Georgia State University. She also is the principal investigator of the Neuroendocrinology and Behavior Laboratory. Her research program investigates sex differences in stress responses and their contribution to disease vulnerability and resilience. Using techniques from behavioral neuroscience, molecular neuroscience, and neuroendocrinology, her laboratory has identified sex differences in sensitivity to corticotropin releasing factor that bias females towards hyperarousal and males towards cognitive impairments. She also investigates how early life experience can promote sex-specific resilience to alterations in cognition and motivation. Dr. Bangasser’s research program received the Janett Rosenberg Trubatch Career Development Award from the Society for Neuroscience, which recognizes originality and creativity in research, and an American Psychological Association Presidential Citation.

Addiction & sex differences in neuroimaging
			Prof Jill B. Becker, University of Michigan. Dr. Becker received her Ph.D. in Neuroscience from the Univ. of Illinois, Urbana- Champaign. She is the Patricia Y. Gurin Collegiate Professor of Psychology, Research Professor in the Molecular and Behavioral Neuroscience Institute, and Senior Neuroscience Scholar, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Dr. Becker is the author of over 150 articles or chapters and has had numerous grants from the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation. Dr. Becker’s research of the last 30 years has been investigating how gender/sex and ovarian hormones influence brain and behavior. These findings are important for our understanding of the underlying neural processes involved in sex differences in drug abuse and other neurological disorders.

			Prof Rita Z. Goldstein, Mount Sinai. Rita Z. Goldstein, PhD, is the Mount Sinai Professor in Neuroimaging of Addiction in the departments of Psychiatry and Neuroscience at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. Dr. Goldstein is Chief of the Neuropsychoimaging of Addiction and Related Conditions research group. Nationally and internationally known for her neuroimaging and neuropsychological studies in drug addiction, Dr. Goldstein formulated a theoretical model known as Impaired Response Inhibition and Salience Attribution (iRISA). Multiple neuroimaging modalities—including MRI, EEG/ERP, PET—and neuropsychological tests are used to explore the neurobiological underpinnings of iRISA in drug addiction and related conditions. This model has drawn considerable scientific attention (exceeding a total of 6,700 citations for reviews published in the Am J Psychiatry in 2002, Nature Reviews Neuroscience in 2011, and Neuron in 2018). An important application of Dr. Goldstein’s research is to facilitate the development of intervention modalities that would improve cognitive and emotional function, leading to better treatment outcomes, in drug addiction and other chronically relapsing disorders of self-regulation. Dr. Goldstein has authored or co-authored more than 150 highly-cited, peer-reviewed manuscripts and computer science proceedings focusing on the role of the prefrontal cortex in drug addiction. Her research has been independently funded by several federal and private agencies, with total funding of more than $25 million (as a principal or multiple investigator or program director). She became a fellow of the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology in 2015, now serving on its scientific council, receiving the prestigious Joel Elkes Research Award in 2012 and the Jacob P. Waletzky Award in 2013. Mentoring is a high priority for Dr. Goldstein. She has mentored numerous trainees, spanning from postdoctoral fellows to graduate, undergraduate, and high school students. Her trainees have published many first authorship manuscripts in top psychiatry and neuroscience journals, have become principal investigators on their own NIH-funded grants, and many of them are now leading independent research labs at prestigious institutions. Dr. Goldstein earned an undergraduate degree from Tel Aviv University in Israel. She received her PhD in Health Clinical Psychology from the University of Miami after completing a yearlong internship in clinical neuropsychology at the Long Island Jewish Medical Center. She then completed her postdoctoral training on brain imaging and alcohol abuse through a fellowship from the National Institutes of Health at Brookhaven National Laboratory, under the mentorship of Drs. Nora D. Volkow and Joanna S. Fowler.

			Prof Christina Dalla, University of Athens. Dr. Christina Dalla is Professor of Pharmacology at the Medical School, 2nd Department of Obstetrics – Gynecology, Aretaieio Hospital of the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, President of the Mediterranean Neuroscience Society and President of the Hellenic Brain Council. She is also member of the board of directors of the Greek Association of Academic Women (ELGYP) and the European Brain Foundation in Brussels. Dr. Dalla serves as a member of the Gender Equality Committee of her University since 2021 and she is chair of the Gender Equality Committee of the Medical School. She is co-chair of the event’s working group at ALBA Network: towards diversity and equity in brain sciences, chair of the Communication Committee of the Federation of European neuroscience Societies/FENS, section-editor at European Journal of Neuroscience and member of the Educational and Scientific Committees of the European College of Neuropsychopharmacology-ECNP. She also serves at committees at the National Medicines Association of Greece (EOF) and the Ministry of Health. Her work focuses on sex differences in neuropsychiatric disorders and novel treatments with a focus on depression and anxiety. Dr. Dalla received her first diploma from the Pharmacy School of the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens in 2000 and continued her studies in Neuropsychopharmacology, Behavioral Neuroendocrinology and Neurosciences in Athens, at the University of Liege in Belgium and at the Rutgers University of New Jersey, U.S.A. with two European Union Marie Curie Fellowships. She has received numerous awards and distinctions, such as the “L’Oreal-Unesco” for Greek Women in Science and the ECNP fellowship award. Dr. Dalla has more than 100 scientific papers and invited chapters, over 5700 citations and more than 130 abstracts and talks at international and national conferences. Finally, she is actively participating in public activities for brain awareness and women’s medicine, such as publishing of books for the public.

			A/ Prof Georgia E. Hodes, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University. Dr. Hodes’ work in mice and human subjects identifies the underlying biology that contributes to vulnerability and resilience to stress and mood disorders respectively. She is interested in understanding how the sex of an individual contributes to their susceptibility to stress and depression. Her goal is to develop novel personalized treatments and bioassays for mental illness so these disorders can be medically diagnosed and treated effectively. Dr. Hodes received her Ph.D. from the Behavioral and Systems Neuroscience division of the Psychology program in 2007. At Rutgers University her research explored sex differences in the effects of stress on learning and brain plasticity across the lifespan. In 2007 she began postdoctoral training in Pharmacology with Dr. Irwin Lucki at the University of Pennsylvania examining the contribution of growth factors and adult neurogenesis to genetic and sex differences in vulnerability to stress. In 2010, she joined the laboratory of Dr. Scott Russo as a post-doctoral fellow for training in molecular neuroscience. Her work at Mt. Sinai focused on neuro-immunological and epigenetic mechanisms contributing to individual differences in stress susceptibility. In 2013 she received a postdoctoral NARSAD young investigator award to examine the role of the cytokine Interleukin-6 in stress susceptibility. In 2015 she was promoted to Assistant Professor at Mt. Sinai. In 2016 she left Mt. Sinai to join the newly formed school of neuroscience at Virginia tech as an Assistant professor where she received a second NARSAD young investigator award to examine sex differences in the effects of stress on the peripheral immune system. She is an author on over 50 scientific papers and has contributed to 3 different textbooks. She currently runs her own research laboratory at Virginia Tech examining how sex differences in the immune system interact with the brain to drive behavioral differences in susceptibility and resiliency to stress.

Where to from here? Clinical & societal endpoints
			Prof Tony George, University of Toronto & Centre for Addiction and Mental Health. Dr. George is Professor of Psychiatry and in the Institute of Medical Sciences in the Temerty Faculty of Medicine at the University of Toronto (UofT), and Senior Scientist at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH) in Toronto, Canada. He received his B.Sc. (1988) and M.D. (1992) degrees from Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada, and then did his psychiatry residency (1992-96) and a fellowship in translational neuroscience (1996-98) at Yale University. He joined the Yale Psychiatry faculty in 1998, and was promoted to Associate Professor in 2004. In 2006, he moved to UofT and CAMH as the Chair in Addiction Psychiatry, which he held until 2012. He has held a number of leadership positions, including as Chief of Schizophrenia (2008-16) and Addictions (2016-19) Divisions and Medical Director of the Complex Mental lllness Program (2012-16) at CAMH, and Co-Director of the Brain and Therapeutics Division in the UofT Department of Psychiatry (2006-2018).

			A/Prof Anna Zilverstand, University of Minnesota. Dr. Anna Zilverstand received a BS, MS and PhD in Psychology, Cognitive and Clinical Neuroscience from Maastricht University, followed by her postdoctoral training at Mount Sinai, New York City. She joined faculty at the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at the University of Minnesota in 2019, as a member of the Medical Discovery Team on Addiction. Her current work is aimed at understanding individual differences in the complex mechanisms underlying human drug addiction. To achieve this, she collects and analyzes the big data sets necessary to begin unraveling how social, psychological, clinical and neurobiological factors interact to drive addiction. The overarching goal is to inform the development of personalized early interventions and treatments for addiction medicine.

			Dr Linda Montanari, European Union Drugs Agency. Linda Montanari is a health sociologist, working at the European Union Drugs Agency (EUDA) as a principal scientist since 2000. Within the centre, she coordinates three key areas: gender and drugs, prison and drugs and psychiatric comorbidity. In the area of gender and drugs, her work aims to systematically integrate a gender perspective in the European drug field, including monitoring and recommendations. She coordinates the European Group on Gender and Drugs (EDG) involving European and international experts. The 2nd symposium on Gender and Drugs will take place on 22 October 2024 as a side event of the LX Addiction 2024 conference. At the EUDA she also coordinates an internal group aimed at including gender equality, diversity and inclusion perspectives in the organisation.

			Dr Erynn Christensen, Feinstein Institutes for Medical Research. Erynn Christensen, PhD is a Postdoctoral Researcher in the Brain-based Predictive Modelling Lab at the Feinstein Institutes for Medical Research. She investigates the influence of sex hormones on neurocognitive functions. Erynn is particularly interested in relationships between fluctuations in female sex hormones, neurocognition, and mental health, both across the menstrual cycle and during key life transitional periods such as puberty, pregnancy, and menopause. Erynn earned her Bachelor of Psychological Sciences (with Honours) in 2017 and completed her PhD in 2024 at Monash University, Australia. Her PhD focused on the neurocognitive correlates and predictors of addictive behaviors, with a particular emphasis on longitudinal models and cognitive task development. Erynn has also worked extensively in the cannabis use space. She was instrumental in launching and executing Australia’s first study that collected and analysed street cannabis directly from consumers. This research allowed for the longitudinal evaluation of how different cannabinoid ratios in cannabis products affected cognition and mental health in regular cannabis users.

Panel remarks
			Prof Ziva Cooper, University of California Los Angeles. Ziva Cooper, Ph.D. is the Director of the UCLA Center for Cannabis and Cannabinoids in the Jane and Terry Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior and Professor in the UCLA Departments of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences and Anesthesiology. Her research involves understanding variables that influence both the therapeutic potential and adverse effects of cannabis and cannabinoids, the chemicals in the cannabis plant, including their sex-dependent effects. Dr. Cooper received her PhD from the University of Michigan in Biopsychology in 2007 in the field of preclinical psychopharmacology, experience that informs her focus on translating preclinical studies of cannabinoids to the clinic using placebo-controlled human drug-administration studies. Ziva served on the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine Committee on the Health Effects of Cannabis that published a comprehensive report of the health effects of cannabis and cannabinoids in 2017. She is also serving on the current National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine Committee on the public health consequences of changes in the cannabis policy landscape. Her current projects funded by the NIH and California State include understanding the potential for cannabis constituents to reduce reliance on opioids, differences between men and women in their response to the pain-relieving effects of cannabis, effects of cannabis as a function of age, and therapeutic effects of cannabinoids in patient populations. She is the immediate past president of the International Cannabinoid Research Society, a past Board Director for the College on Problems of Drug Dependence, an Associate Editor of Neuropsychopharmacology and is on several Editorial Boards of journals including Cannabis and Cannabinoid Research.

			Prof Hugh Garavan, University of Vermont. Dr. Hugh Garavan is a Professor in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Vermont. He received his PhD in Cognitive Psychology and Behavioral Neuroscience from Bowling Green State University in Ohio and completed postdoctoral fellowships at Cornell University and the Medical College of Wisconsin. He was an Associate Professor in the School of Psychology at Trinity College Dublin prior to his move to Vermont in 2011. His research uses structural and functional neuroimaging to study cognitive control and reward processes with a particular interest in how functional changes in these systems may contribute to addiction and related mental health issues. In addition to studying current abusers of numerous drugs, he has researched the importance of cognitive control systems for successful drug abstinence. His primary research focus of the last few years has been adolescent neurodevelopment including risk factors for psychopathology and drug use. He is a co-investigator on the IMAGEN project, a longitudinal neuroimaging-genetic study of over 2,000 teens in Europe. He is a site PI and Associate Director of the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development study, a longitudinal neuroimaging-genetic study of over 11,000 children in the USA. He is PI on a T32 that trains pre- and postdoctoral fellows in the application of complex systems methodologies to large neuroimaging datasets and is co-founder of the ENIGMA-Addiction working group which is a data pooling endeavor that combines neuroimaging data from thousands of substance users from around the world. He is also site PI and a member of the coordinating core of the Healthy Brain Child Development study, a longitudinal study of over 7,000 pregnant people and their children from birth to age 10. Dr. Garavan is a member of several professional societies, has served as secretary for the Organization for Human Brain Mapping, was a standing member of the NPAS study section, has been a reviewer for the NSF, several European grant-giving agencies, and over 50 journals. He has published over 400 papers in the fields of cognitive neuroscience and addiction.

Organizing committee
			A/Prof Valentina Lorenzetti, Australian Catholic University
			Prof Rita Valentino, National Institute on Drug Abuse
			Dr Erynn Christensen, Feinstein Institutes for Medical Research
			Isabella Goodwin, The University of Melbourne & Australian Catholic University. Isabella Goodwin is a PhD candidate at the University of Melbourne and Research Associate at Australian Catholic University. Her PhD research aims to unpack behavioural and neural correlates of psychotic experiences using computational modeling and neuroimaging techniques to understand how alterations in perceptual expectations go awry in psychosis. At ACU, her research aims to identify key metrics in cannabis exposure including an expert consensus on reporting THC content in cannabis products. She is interested in the neurobiological interplay between cannabis use and psychosis onset.

			Sophia Thomopoulos, University of Southern California - ENIGMA Consortium Project Manager

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