Dr. Andrea Hobkirk is the principal investigator of the addiction, behavioral neuroscience and social determinants of health research lab area in the Department of Psychiatry. Her lab’s mission is to better understand pathways between the brain and behavior that lead to the development and treatment of addiction.

She is working to uncover how pre-existing differences in stress, reward and executive control systems make some individuals more likely to develop an addiction when they first start using a drug, and how these same systems can be changed with intervention to alleviate addiction.

Although her lab studies many substances of abuse, her current projects are focused on how brain function changes as people develop and recover from nicotine addiction. She is specifically interested in how tobacco product features, like flavors, affect the development of nicotine addiction.

Her research studies collect data from participants through surveys, computer games, functional magnetic resonance imaging and biomarkers such as blood, urine and saliva.