Evan Morris, PhD, has been accepted as a visiting scholar at The Hasting Center in Garrison, N.Y. for two weeks in August. Morris plans to write a draft of a research paper exploring the ethics of neuroimaging. A professor of Radiology & Biomedical Imaging, Biomedical Engineering and Psychiatry, his research for the last 25 years has been in the imaging of drug addiction and alcoholism. Most of his work has been with PET imaging, although some has been with fMRI.
Morris and his trainees invented mathematical methods for creating “dopamine movies” from PET images of a subject smoking a cigarette. “With these movies, we have identified sex differences in the brain’s processing of reward from cigarette smoking. We think of the dopamine movies as possible ‘signatures of addiction,’” he said.