Why You Should Care about the Genetics of Addiction: Implications for Prevention, Intervention, and Treatment

Danielle M. Dick, Ph.D. is a Distinguished Commonwealth Professor in the Departments of Psychology and Human and Molecular Genetics at Virginia Commonwealth University. She received her Ph.D. in Psychology in 2001 from Indiana University and subsequently completed a postdoctoral fellowship in the Department of Medical and Molecular Genetics. She was on the faculty at Washington University, St. Louis from 2003 – 2007 before joining VCU. Her research involves studying how genetic predispositions interact with environmental factors to contribute to patterns of substance use/misuse and related behavioral disorders across development. She is the founder and current Director of the College Behavioral and Emotional Health Institute (cobe.vcu.edu) at VCU. She launched and co-directs the Spit for Science project (spit4science.vcu.edu), which has enrolled over 12,000 college students in order to study substance use and emotional health outcomes in emerging adults. She has served as the Principal Investigator (PI) or site PI on 13 National Institutes of Health (NIH) grants, and Co-Investigator on another 9 NIH grants, with grant funding totaling >25 million dollars. She is the previous recipient of a National Science Foundation Graduate Fellowship, an NIH NRSA Postdoctoral Fellowship, a NARSAD Young Investigator Award, and an NIAAA K02 mid-career award. She has >325 peer-reviewed publications, and has won numerous awards, including the Behavior Genetics Association Fuller & Scott Award for Outstanding Young Investigator in 2006, the Fulker Award for best paper published in the journal Behavior Genetics in 2007, the Research Society on Alcoholism Young Investigator Award in 2010, the World Congress on Psychiatric Genetics Richard Todd Award in Child Psychiatry in 2011, the World Congress on Psychiatric Genetics Theodore Reich Young Investigator Award in 2012, the inaugural Indiana University Department of Psychology Young Alumni award in 2013, and the Association of Recovery Schools Award for Outstanding Contribution to Recovery Research in an Education Setting in 2018.