F&M Stories

The late Nadia Chaudhri was a professor of psychology at Concordia University in Montreal, where she researched drug and alcohol abuse. She was born and raised in Karachi, Pakistan, but moved to the United States at age 17. She graduated from Franklin & Marshall in 1999, majoring in biological foundations of behavior with a concentration in neuroscience. She earned the Williamson Medal as the most outstanding graduate of her class.

Dr. Chaudhri then earned a Howard Hughes Medical Institute fellowship to complete her doctoral degree at the University of Pittsburgh. She completed her post-doctoral training at the Ernest Gallo Clinic and Research Center at the University of California, San Francisco, where she found that physical surroundings where alcohol cues are experienced can greatly influence the ability of those cues to trigger a relapse.

Dr. Chaudhri joined the Center for Studies in Behavioral Neurobiology at Concordia University in 2010. Her research there was funded by numerous organizations, including the Canadian Institutes of Health Research and the Canadian Foundation for Innovation. Her research team, composed of undergraduates, graduate students and postdoctoral fellows, studied the effect that environmental cues have on drug use, misuse and relapse, specifically the psychological processes that underpin how people associate stimuli in the environment with the psychopharmacological effects of drugs.

Results of her team's research, published in scholarly journals, include showing that Pavlovian-conditioned alcohol-seeking is mediated by dopamine, and that stimulation of the brain's infralimbic cortex could inhibit responses to environmental cues that predict sugar. The ultimate goal of this research is to help people who have substance-abuse disorders overcome the powerful effects that drug-predictive cues can have on drug-seeking behavior and relapse.

Dr. Chaudhri's legacy includes the creation and funding of the Nadia Chaudhri Wingspan Award at Concordia University, which supports the neuroscience training of students from marginalized communities.

In 2020, Dr. Chaudhri was diagnosed with advanced ovarian cancer. Despite the difficulties of the COVID-19 pandemic, she underwent chemotherapy treatment for that cancer. During her illness, she also launched a GoFundMe campaign to raise money to provide travel awards for young scholars, so they could participate in the annual meeting for the Research Society on Alcoholism. Despite a courageous and public battle with cancer that she shared on social media, Dr. Chaudhri passed away on October 5, 2021.

Dr. Nadia Chaudhri, for your lifelong commitment to scholarship; for your ground-breaking research in drug and alcohol abuse; and for your courageous and selfless actions to support the next generation of scholars in your field, even as you faced advanced ovarian cancer, Franklin & Marshall College posthumously bestows upon you the Honorary Degree, Doctor of Science.