Erin Calipari, associate professor at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, has been awarded the 2024 Jacob P. Waletzky Award from the Society for Neuroscience. She was recognized for her outstanding early-career research on drug addiction and treatment.
A Vanderbilt faculty member since 2017, Dr. Calipari currently holds appointments in the department of pharmacology and the department of molecular physiology and biophysics in the School of Medicine, as well as the department of psychiatry and behavioral sciences in the Vanderbilt University Medical Center. She is also a member of the Vanderbilt Brain Institute, the Vanderbilt Institute for Infection, Immunology, and Inflammation, and the Vanderbilt Kennedy Center. Earlier this year, she was named director of the Vanderbilt Center for Addiction Research.
Dr. Calipari’s research seeks to characterize and modulate the precise circuits in the brain that underlie both adaptive and maladaptive processes in reward, motivation, and associative learning, to develop improved treatments for complex and devastating psychiatric disorders. Through her scholarship, she aims to combine cutting edge technology with comprehensive models of psychiatric disease to understand the circuit and molecular dysregulation that underlies psychiatric disorders.
Dr. Calipari received bachelor’s degrees in biology and psychology from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. She holds a Ph.D. in neuroscience from Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.