In 2000, the NCRG awarded a contract to Harvard Medical School’s Division on Addictions to establish the Institute for Research on Pathological Gambling and Related Disorders. The Institute’s mission is to alleviate the individual, social, medical and economic burdens caused by pathological gambling through support of rigorous scientific research. Advancing understanding of pathological gambling and related psychiatric disorders, such as substance abuse, will lead to improved methods of diagnosis, intervention, treatment and prevention.

Modeled after the National Institutes of Health, the Institute supports both internal core gambling research and competitively funded external research at educational, medical and research institutions worldwide. Scientific advisory panels evaluate research proposals and determine through peer review the research to be funded. The Institute’s internal research program is led by Dr. Howard Shaffer, the director of the Division on Addictions, whose research into gambling addiction has pioneered the field. In 2005, the Division on Addictions, and with it the Institute, moved to the Cambridge Health Alliance, a teaching affiliate of Harvard Medical School.