Dr. Sandra Comer is Professor of Neurobiology in the Department of Psychiatry at Columbia University. She received her BS at Vanderbilt University and PhD at the University of Michigan for her research on the effects of drugs using preclinical models. Dr. Comer is Director of the Opioid Research Laboratory in the Division on Substance Use Disorders and her current research focus is on the clinical testing of medications for treating opioid use disorder (OUD), methods to maximize the use of naloxone by opioid users, and evaluations of the comparative abuse liability of prescribed pain medications. Dr. Comer served as President of the College on Problems of Drug Dependence, the longest standing scholarly society in the U.S. devoted to research on substance use disorders, and currently is the Public Policy Officer for CPDD. She also is currently President and Chair of the Board of Directors of the Friends of NIDA. She is a voting member of the Expert Advisory Panel on Drug Dependence for the World Health Organization, serves as a consultant for the United Nations, testifies before Congress on issues related to opioids, and has over 200 publications on substance use disorders.

For the past two decades, Dr. Comer has been investigating novel medications for the treatment of OUD. She developed a unique laboratory model of drug self-administration in human research volunteers in order to study the ability of medications to reduce drug-taking behavior. Thus far, she has examined both agonist (buprenorphine, buprenorphine/naloxone) and antagonist opioid medications (depot naltrexone), as well as glutamate antagonists (memantine, dextromethorphan) and glial cell modulators (pioglitazone, ibudilast, minocycline) as potential treatments for OUD. Dr. Comer currently is developing a transcutaneous device to treat drug overdose and opioid vaccines as potential medications for OUD. In addition to her search for medications and devices that may be useful for treating OUD and overdose, Dr. Comer is also interested in studying the short- and long-term cognitive deficits that may occur following opioid overdose.