Hedy Kober, PhD, associate professor of psychiatry and of psychology, has been chosen to receive the Jacob P. Waletzky Award from the Society of Neuroscience (SfN).
The award recognizes an early career scientist whose independent research has led to significant conceptual and empirical contributions to the understanding of drug addiction and who plans to continue to make significant contributions to addiction research and treatment. The award is endowed by the Waletzky Family and The Waletzky Award Prize Fund and includes a $30,000 prize and travel to SfN’s annual meeting Nov 11-15 in Washington, DC.
At the meeting, SfN will honor several leading researchers whose pioneering work has transformed neuroscience, including the understanding of the visual system, addiction, synaptic plasticity, and learning and memory.
“The Society is honored to recognize this year’s awardees whose groundbreaking work has transformed our understanding of plasticity in the mammalian brain — from the synaptic level to the systems level — as well as uncovered neuronal mechanisms behind addiction, compulsion, and depression,” SfN President Oswald Steward said. “These neuroscientists’ innovative approaches and paradigm‐shifting findings have overturned previous doctrine, revolutionized our understanding of the field and provided hope for novel therapeutic approaches.”
Kober is a cognitive neuroscientist and clinical psychologist who has made transformative contributions to the addiction field in her studies on diagnosis, treatment, and drug craving and relapse.
Her lab at Yale School of Medicine uses state-of-the-art cognitive neuroscience and neuroimaging approaches to address central questions of emotion regulation and addiction. She performed a large meta-analysis that resolved a fundamental question in the field by showing that craving predicts drug use and relapse across drug types and measurement types, demonstrating that craving is a useful measure of treatment outcomes. Her research also revealed substantial similarities in the brain’s response to drug cues and non-drug rewards.
Kober created the first brain-based biomarker of drug craving, using it to classify users of drugs from non-users with high accuracy — truly innovative work with implications for both diagnosis and treatment of addictions.
She showed her understanding in how treatments for addictions work by creating a novel task that demonstrated that cognitive-behavioral strategies and mindfulness approaches rely on different brain structures. She was the first to identify the promise of modeling treatment components using fMRI to understand their neural mechanisms and is helping create a digital platform to make diagnoses and education more widely available.