Jeffrey Parrilla-Carrero , PhD knows the face of addiction. As a boy in Puerto Rico, he watched his father battle alcohol use disorder, cycling through attempts to quit that ended in disappointment. The struggle left questions that never stopped tugging at him. Those questions would one day guide Parrilla-Carrero from an aspiring engineer to a neuroscientist — and ultimately, to SIU School of Medicine. Watching his father try and fail to stop drinking sparked young Jeffrey’s curiosity. “At first I thought it was a lack of willpower,” he said. “But I came to understand that addiction is a
