Nasir Naqvi
American physician-scientist trained in the Iowa cognitive- neuroscience tradition. Graduate student at the University of Iowa Carver College of Medicine's Division of Cognitive Neuroscience in the 2000s, working with Antoine Bechara and Hanna Damasio on the Iowa Patient Registry; first author of the 2007 Science paper on insula damage and nicotine addiction. Subsequently moved to Columbia Psychiatry, where he has continued working on the insula's role in addiction and craving.
Stake§
Naqvi's stake is scientific and clinical. The 2007 paper was the causal-evidence break-through for the modern interoceptive view of addiction, and his post-2007 work has extended the programme into neuroimaging and stimulation-based treatment approaches for nicotine and other substance-use disorders. The clinical-research position at Columbia gives him access to patient populations that the Iowa registry alone could not have provided; the methodological range has widened accordingly.
The 2007 Damage to the insula disrupts addiction to cigarette smoking is the paper Naqvi will be remembered for. The cohort: 19 smokers with focal brain damage involving the insula, matched against 50 smokers with brain damage elsewhere; the finding, that the insula-lesion patients had quit smoking immediately and without persistent craving, was the cleanest causal-evidence demonstration the field had produced that the insula is necessary for sustaining substance-use addiction. The work draws on the lesion-method tradition established by Antonio Damasio and Hanna Damasio at Iowa across the 1980s and 1990s.
The post-2007 work at Columbia has extended the addiction programme into functional neuroimaging studies of craving, the clinical-trial literature on transcranial-magnetic-stimulation approaches to nicotine cessation, and the broader theoretical framing of addiction as an interoceptive disorder — the substance representing a felt urge with a now reasonably well-identified neural substrate, rather than a behavioural pattern alone.
Naqvi is the figure who, with Bechara, converted the somatic-marker lesion-method tradition into the foundational causal-evidence paper of the modern insula-and-addiction literature. The career arc — Iowa training, Science paper as graduate student, Columbia faculty position, sustained programme on the same topic across two decades — is the kind of career neuroscience hopes to produce more of.