McGaugh Distinguished Seminar Series

Tuesday, April 14th, 2026 at 11:00am

The seminar will be In-Person.

Dr. Yavin Shaham, NIDA-IRP

Branch Chief & Senior Investigator, Intramural Research Program, NIDA-NIH, Baltimore, MD

Rats can make good choices:

Effect of alternative food and social rewards on drug use and relapse in rat models of addiction

Abstract:

In previous studies, we and others used a rat model of drug relapse and craving to demonstrate time-dependent increases in drug seeking following experimenter-imposed (forced) abstinence in the homecage—a phenomenon we termed incubation of drug craving (Grimm et al., Nature, 2001). More recently, we developed a rat model to study drug craving and relapse following extended periods of voluntary abstinence in the drug-associated environment. Voluntary abstinence is achieved through a mutually exclusive discrete-choice procedure, in which male and female rats with a history of intravenous opioid or psychostimulant self-administration choose daily between palatable food or social interaction with a peer versus the addictive drug. We propose that these voluntary abstinence models reflect key elements of operant-based human treatments, such as contingency management (where alternative rewards are monetary vouchers) and the community reinforcement approach (where positive social interactions serve as reinforcement). In this lecture, I will introduce the voluntary abstinence models and present behavioral and neural circuit analyses of drug craving and relapse after the removal of the food or social rewards.

Bio:

Yavin Shaham earned his B.S. and M.A. from Hebrew University in Jerusalem and his Ph.D. from the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences in Bethesda, MD. He completed postdoctoral training at Concordia University in Montreal under the mentorship of Dr. Jane Stewart. Before joining the NIDA Intramural Research Program (IRP), he was an investigator at the Addiction Research Center in Toronto. He is currently a tenured Branch Chief and Senior Investigator at NIDA. Shaham’s major awards include the Society for Neuroscience’s Jacob Waletzky Award for innovative research in drug and alcohol addiction (2006), the NARSAD Distinguished Investigator Grant Award (2016), the NIDA-IRP Investigator Mentoring Award (2016), the European Behavioral Pharmacology Society (EBPS) Distinguished Achievement Award (2017), the NIH Director’s Award of Merit (2020), and the NIH Ruth Kirschstein Mentoring Award (2022). In 2023, he was invited to present his research at a Nobel symposium on the “Social Brain.” Shaham has published over 250 empirical papers, reviews, and commentaries, with more than 44,500 citations and an h-index of 115 (Google Scholar). In 2018, Shaham was named by The Web of Science as a “Highly Cited Researcher” (top 1%). From 2008 to 2018, he served as a Reviewing and Senior Editor for The Journal of Neuroscience. Currently, he is a Reviewing Editor for Neuropsychopharmacology and an Advisory Board Member for eNeuro. He also serves on the editorial boards of Biological Psychiatry, Psychopharmacology, Behavioural Pharmacology, and Addiction Biology. Additionally, Shaham was the President of EBPS from 2021 to 2023. His research focuses on the mechanisms of relapse to opioid and psychostimulant seeking, using rat models developed in his lab.