Speaker Profile
Antonello Bonci

Antonello Bonci MD

Neurology
Baltimore, Maryland, United States of America

Connect with the speaker?

Dr. Bonci joined the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in 2010 as Scientific Director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA). My laboratory was the first to demonstrate that drugs of abuse such as cocaine produce long-lasting modifications on the strength of the connections between neurons. This form of cellular memory is called long-term potentiation (LTP.) This finding cast a new light on the phenomenon of drug addiction, which may represent a process of maladaptive learning and memory at the cellular level. In turn, this information helped explain why drug taking can often become such a long-lasting phenomenon.
EVENTS & ACTIVITIES (Speaking, Spoken, and Authored)