scientific advisory board

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George F. Koob, PhD, Chairman
Dr. Koob is an expert in neurobiology of drug dependence and psychiatric disorders. He has over 30 years experience in the development of preclinical models of drug reinforcement, drug craving and withdrawal for substances including alcohol, nicotine and numerous illicit drugs. Dr. Koob is also recognized as an expert in the neuropharmacology of stress and anxiety disorders. He has trained more than 60 post doctoral fellows and graduate students and is an author of over 600 scientific publications. Dr. Koob is Professor and Chairman of the Committee on the Neurobiology of Addictive Disorders at The Scripps Research Institute, La Jolla, California. He also is an adjunct Professor in the Departments of Psychology, Psychiatry and the Skaggs School of Pharmacy at the University of California San Diego.

Bernhard Bettler, PhD
Dr. Bettler has extensive expertise in mental health disorders, neurotransmitter receptors and drug discovery, including the identification and development of allosteric modulators of GPCRs. Since 2001 he has been full professor and head of the Institute of Physiology, Medical Faculty of the University of Basel. He also serves as a co-director of the Neurosciences Focus Area at the Department of Clinical-Biological Sciences, a joint Department of the Medical Faculty, the University Hospital Basel and the Children’s Hospital States of Basel-Stadt and Basel-Land. In 1994 he was program team head of drug discovery projects in the Nervous System Department at Ciba (now Novartis).  He then worked in the Biotechnology Department of Ciba in Basel and at the Salk Institute in San Diego, California.  Dr. Bettler received a PhD from the University of Zurich in 1986. 

Mark A. Geyer, PhD
Dr. Geyer is a Professor of Psychiatry and Neurosciences and Vice Chair for Scientific Affairs in the Department of Psychiatry, University of California, San Diego.  He is the Director of the Neuro-psychopharmacology Unit of the Veteran’s Administration VISN 22 MIRECC and a major contributor to both the MATRICS and TURNS programs funded by NIMH to advance treatments for cognition in schizophrenia.  Dr. Geyer is a specialist in the neurobiology and psychopharmacology of psychiatric disorders, including schizophrenia and drug dependence. He is one of the foremost authorities on preclinical models of psychiatric disorders, especially schizophrenia. Dr. Geyer is a scientific advisor to several major pharmaceutical companies and is an author of more than 350 scientific publications.

Barbara J. Mason, PhD
Dr. Mason is a Professor and Director of the Laboratory of Clinical Psychopharmacology in the Committee on the Neurobiology of Addictive Disorders and Co-Director of The Pearson Center for Alcoholism and Addiction Research at The Scripps Research Institute and is an expert in clinical development of medications for alcohol dependence.  She served as overall principal investigator for the first US study of acamprosate as a novel treatment of alcohol dependence, which was conducted in 21 centers across the United States.  Dr. Mason’s work in medication development to prevent relapse in alcohol dependence has been recognized with a MERIT award from the National Institutes of Health.  She is currently pursuing a program of NIAAA- and NIDA-funded research that includes human laboratory studies to rapidly screen potential relapse prevention medications and clinical trials to evaluate the safety and efficacy of novel medications to prevent relapse in individuals with alcohol and/or cannabis dependence.

Jean-Philippe Pin, PhD
Dr. Pin is director of the Institute of Functional Genomics (Montpellier, France) where he has been head of the Molecular Pharmacology Department since 2003. His research is focused on the molecular and cellular dynamics of GPCRs, mostly mGlu and GABA-B receptors. Over his career, he has participated in the discovery and characterization of the metabotropic glutamate receptors and his research contributed to the elucidation of new concepts in the GPCR field, such as: the activation of cell surface receptors by intracellular proteins; the regulation of GPCRs by both negative and positive allosteric modulators; and the asymmetric functioning of GPCR dimers. He managed a team focused on the structure function relationship of mGluRs in Joel Bockaert's laboratory in Montpellier starting in 1992. As a post doctoral fellow at the Salk Institute, he cloned and characterized new mGlu receptor variants. He received his PhD in Molecular Biology in 1987 at the University of Montpellier 2.