Senior Investigator, Branch Chief, Deputy Scientific Director
NIH, NIDA and NIAAA
Dr. Lorenzo Leggio is a Senior Investigator (Clinical) in the NIH Intramural Research Program with faculty appointments both at NIDA and NIAAA. He serves as Chief of the Clinical Psychoneuroendocrinology and Neuropsychopharmacology Section, a joint NIDA and NIAAA laboratory. He also serves as the NIDA Deputy Scientific Director, Chief of the NIDA IRP Translational Addiction Medicine Branch, Director for the NIDA IRP Translational Analytical Core and Associate Director for Clinical Research for the NIDA IRP Medication Development Program. He also serves as a NIH Senior Attending Medical Staff and as senior medical advisor to the NIAAA Director. Dr. Leggio received his M.D. and Ph.D. from the Catholic University of Rome and ‘Agostino Gemelli’ hospital, where he also completed residency and received Board Certification in Internal Medicine. He was a postdoctoral research associate in Psychiatry and Human Behavior at Brown University, Providence, RI. In 2010, he joined the faculty of the Brown University Medical School as Assistant Professor at the Brown University Center for Alcohol and Addiction Studies, where he still holds an adjunct appointment as Professor in Behavioral and Social Sciences. He is also an Adjunct Professor of Addiction Medicine at Johns Hopkins University and Adjunct Professor of Neuroscience at Georgetown University. Dr. Leggio’s clinical research has been focused on the treatment of alcohol and substance use disorders, with an emphasis on the role of microbiome-gut-liver-brain and neuroendocrine pathways as well as GABAergic pathways; and on the medical consequences of alcohol use disorder, focusing on alcohol-associated liver disease. Dr. Leggio received the 2008 Nordmann Award from the European Society for Biomedical Research on Alcoholism, the 2016 Early Career Investigator Award from the Research Society on Alcoholism, the 2018 Eva King Killam Award from the American College on Neuropsychopharmacology and the 2020 Jacob P. Waletzky Award from the Society for Neuroscience.
