Dr. Nicholas Goeders was born and raised in Louisiana.  He attended the Louisiana State University (LSU) in Baton Rouge and graduated with a BS in Psychology, with a minor in Chemistry from LSU-Shreveport in 1978.  Dr. Goeders received his Ph.D. in Pharmacology from the School of Graduate Studies at the LSU Medical Center in Shreveport in 1984.  He was awarded the Chancellor’s Award for his dissertation research on the role for the prefrontal cortex in cocaine reward.  His first scientific publication, in 1983, was in the premiere scientific publication in the world, Science, and was titled “Cortical dopaminergic involvement in cocaine reinforcement.”  This publication focused on his dissertation research.

Dr. Goeders left Louisiana for a postdoctoral fellowship in the Department of Neuroscience at The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore in 1984 in the laboratories of Dr. Michael Kuhar.  This is one of the top Neuroscience departments in the country and was under the leadership of Dr. Solomon Snyder.  Dr. Goeders was also a staff fellow at the Addiction Research Center at the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) of the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

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Dr. Goeders returned to the LSU Health Sciences Center in Shreveport (LSUHSC-S) in the fall of 1985 as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Pharmacology & Therapeutics.  Dr. Goeders has been very successful over the past 30+ years as he rose through the ranks to Professor, and he was named Head of the Department of Pharmacology, Toxicology & Neuroscience at LSUHSC-S in 2005.

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Dr. Goeders has led a very successful research program, and he is considered one of the world’s leaders on the role for stress in drug addiction.  While anecdotal reports have suggested that stress influences relapse to drug use for many years, Dr. Goeders’ research has helped to determine the mechanisms responsible for this phenomenon.  Dr. Goeders has been invited to speak on his research at Universities and Scientific Societies across the United States as well as in Europe, Asia and South America.  He has published over 105 manuscripts in major pharmacological and neurobiological journals and has written 15 book chapters.

Dr. Goeders served on the LSUHSC-S Institutional Review Board for human research for 12 years and spent 4 years as Chair, with an additional 2 years as Chair of two IRB committees in 2008-2009.  He is a past President of the General Faculty and was the Senate Representative to the LSU Board of Supervisors.  He has also served on the Promotion & Tenure Committee, the Scientific Misconduct Review Board, the Scientific Advisory Review for Technology Transfer, the Graduate Advisory Council, the Conflict of Interest Committee, the Institutional Research Advisory Committee and a number of other Institutional Committees at LSUHSC-S.

Dr. Goeders has been the major advisor for 10 Ph.D. and 3 MS students and has served on the graduate advisory committees for over 40 students.  He has also trained 10 postdoctoral fellows and hosted 2 sabbaticals.  He has taught autonomic pharmacology, psychopharmacology, and addiction pharmacology to medical students and graduate students for over 30 years, and his lectures are always well received by the students.  He was twice nominated for the Allan A. Copping award for excellence in teaching.

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Dr. Goeders received research funding from the Pharmaceutical Manufacturers Association and the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) for his doctoral research and an individual NRSA grant from the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) to support his postdoctoral research.  He received his first R01 grant from NIH in 1986, and his research has been continually funded by NIH ever since.  He was also the Director of an Institutional Training Grant for predoctoral students and postdoctoral fellows from the National Institute on Drug Abuse, and this was the only grant of its kind in the state of Louisiana. 

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Dr. Goeders holds 2 patents based on his research, 60/735,5 07 and 5,869,474.  Although the majority of his research has been preclinical, Dr. Goeders has also translated his basic research findings. He co-founded a venture capital-funded company in 2005 to develop a novel pharmacotherapy for the treatment substance use disorders based on the results from his research on stress and addiction.  Embera NeuroTherapeutics, Inc. was initially founded to test a novel combinational drug treatment in individuals with cocaine and methamphetamine substance use disorder and in cigarette smokers, and this pharmacotherapy may also prove to be effective in the treatment of drug and other addictions, including gambling.  Embera funded a pilot clinical trial on the effectiveness of this pharmacotherapy on cocaine relapse in association with the Psychopharmacology Research Clinic through the Department of Psychiatry at LSUHSC-S. Positive significant results were found, and in 2010, Dr. Goeders was awarded a $3.9 M R01 grant for his lab and Embera to conduct FDA-required toxicology tests and manufacture and formulate the compound. This was the largest individual grant of this type ever awarded to LSUHSC-S. In 2016, Embera was awarded a $11M grant to take the compound into Phase II clinical trials for cocaine use disorder.

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Dr. Goeders was on the Board of Directors of the College on Problems of Drug Dependence, and was also the Chair of the Publications Committee.  Dr. Goeders is also a member of several other scientific societies, including the American Society for Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics, the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology and the Society for Neuroscience.  He was a charter member of the Integrative, Functional, Cognitive and Neuroscience (IFCN-1) study section at NIH and has been an ad hoc member of many other NIH study sections, center reviews, concept reviews and other panel reviews.  He has also served on study sections for the Veterans Administration, the Department of Defense and various Primate Research Centers.  He is also an ad hoc reviewer of manuscripts for several scientific journals. 

Dr. Goeders was also elected to the Board of Directors for the Council on Alcoholism and Drug Abuse (CADA) for Northwest Louisiana in 2012, served as Secretary in 2013, and he was elected President in 2015. He also recently founded Loving Solutions (www.lovingsolutions.org ), a faith-based home for women healing from methamphetamine substance use disorder.