Director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse at the NIH, Nora Volkow is a world leader in the neurobiology of diseases of reward and self-control such as addiction and obesity. Nora was born in Mexico City, where she lived until she completed medical school. While training as a psychiatrist in New York City, she started doing research with brain imaging technologies to study how drugs affect the human brain. Nora’s research has been instrumental in demonstrating that addiction is a brain disease that undermines the function of circuits that underlie reward, motivation and self-control—and in identifying overlapping circuitry disruptions in obesity.