David Sulzer

David Sulzer is an American neuroscientist and Professor at Columbia University Medical Center in the Departments of Psychiatry, Neurology, and Pharmacology. Sulzer's lab investigates the interaction between the synapses of the cerebral cortex and the basal ganglia, including the dopamine system, in habit formation, planning, decision making, and diseases of the system.

Sulzer claims in an interview on NOVA that his interest in understanding mechanisms of addiction stem from crashing a talk by William Burroughs at Naropa Institute in 1980, where Burroughs claimed that new synthetic opiates would be so powerful that users would become addicts with a single dose. In an interview in Nature Medicine on his lab's discovery of the mechanism by which nicotine filters synaptic noise and can focus attention to tasks, he recalls his father's early death due to smoking, saying "if some idiot or drug company is going to twist things around, the only thing that would come out of that I'd be horrified by is if people used it to advocate smoking. I think it would be a real travesty if that happened."