Dr. George F. Koob ‘69, an internationally-recognized expert on alcohol and stress, and the neurobiology of alcohol and drug addiction, began his tenure as Director of the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA) on January 27, 2014. 

As NIAAA Director, Dr. Koob oversees a wide range of alcohol-related research, including genetics, neuroscience, epidemiology, prevention, and treatment.

Even before beginning as NIAAA Director, Dr. Koob had a longstanding relationship with the Institute.  Throughout his career, he received funding from NIAAA and other NIH institutes for many significant research projects.  Importantly, he also led a 10-year, NIAAA-funded, multi-institutional consortium dedicated to identifying the molecular basis of alcoholism.

Dr. Koob received his Ph.D. in Behavioral Physiology from Johns Hopkins University in 1972 and a B.S. in Zoology from Penn State in 1969, where he was also a member of the Alpha Zeta fraternity.

He spent most of his career at the Scripps Research Institute, where he served as the Director of the Alcohol Research Center, and as Professor and Chair of the Scripps’ Committee on the Neurobiology of Addictive Disorders.  Early in his career, he served as a researcher in the Department of Neurophysiology at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research and in the Arthur Vining Davis Center for Behavioral Neurobiology at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies.  He was a post-doctoral fellow in the Department of Experimental Psychology at the University of Cambridge.

To read the full background, from NIH, click HERE