Through the new Vanderbilt Center for Addiction Research (VCAR), researchers from diverse scientific disciplines are joining forces to define the molecular events that drive addictive behavior and ultimately to develop new treatments that can help people sustain long-term recovery. The center includes 36 faculty members from eight departments in the School of Medicine and four departments in the College of Arts and Sciences.

"Addiction is a brain disease, a chronic disease that needs to be managed as we would manage any other chronic disease," said the center's founding director, Danny Winder, PhD, professor of Molecular Physiology & Biophysics, Pharmacology and Psychiatry. "It's a disease that desperately needs better pre-clinical models and more information about molecules and neural circuits."