Laurie Lester, PhD
Senior Research Scientist, Northeast Node of the National Drug Abuse Clinical Trials Network.
Center for Technology and Behavioral Health, Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth College
Laurie S. Lester, Ph.D. is a Senior Research Scientist at the Center for Technology and Behavioral Health (CTBH) at Dartmouth College. An Experimental Psychologist and Senior Research Administrator, Dr. Lester received her Ph.D. from Dartmouth College.
Dr. Lester has conducted animal and human studies in the areas of learning and motivation, food/alcohol consumption and food/alcohol effects on cognitive and psychomotor performance. Her work in animals was particularly novel in examining opioid analgesia and changes in foraging strategies in response to naturalistic fear stimuli. Her work in large-scale, federally funded field studies of food/alcohol effects on human behavior included early use and continued development of interactive technologies to collect cognitive performance and alcohol consumption data in real-time.
Dr. Lester has extensive research administration experience having served for many years as the Administrative Director of the University of Vermont’s NIH-funded General Clinical Research Center where she was also a member of the Institutional Review Board. Following NIH’s launch of the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences, Dr. Lester returned to Dartmouth as the Director of Research Operations for the Clinical Translational Science Institute, SYNERGY, prior to joining the CTBH. In her roles at the University of Vermont and Dartmouth, she has contributed to the expansion of high-quality clinical research programs and served as an experienced liaison connecting local scientists/clinicians with research and training opportunities available through NIH national networks.