Marina Elizabeth Wolf is an American neuroscientist and Professor of Behavioral Neuroscience at Oregon Health & Science University.
Previously she served as Professor and Chair of the Department of Neuroscience in the Chicago Medical School at Rosalind Franklin University of Medicine and Science.
Her laboratory is particularly interested in understanding why individuals recovering from substance use disorder remain vulnerable to drug craving and relapse even after long periods of abstinence.
Wolf earned her doctoral degree in Pharmacology in 1986 at Yale University under the mentorship of Dr. Robert Henry Roth.
As a Ph.D. student, postdoctoral fellow, and in the early years of her laboratory at Wayne State University, Dr. Wolf's work focused on fundamental properties of dopamine neurons and their relationship to antipsychotic drug action.
Her laboratory went on to use behavioral, biochemical, cell biological and electrophysiological approaches to demonstrate that glutamate synapses in the reward circuitry, especially the nucleus accumbens, undergo complex plasticity after exposure to drugs of abuse and that this plasticity in some cases plays a causal role in behavioral changes that model drug addiction.