Early Life and Education
Roland Ralph Griffiths was born on 19 July 1946 in Glen Cove, New York, and grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area. He attended Occidental College in Los Angeles, earning his bachelor's degree in 1968, and went on to complete his doctorate in psychology at the University of Minnesota in 1972. His doctoral work focused on the behavioral pharmacology of barbiturates, specifically how pentobarbital affected extinction learning, establishing his credentials in rigorous experimental methodology.
Four Decades at Johns Hopkins
Upon completing his PhD, Griffiths joined the faculty of the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine as an assistant professor in behavioral biology and a research associate in the Department of Psychiatry. He was named research chief in 1975, beginning what would become a more than fifty-year association with the institution.
For the first two decades of his career, Griffiths built his reputation through meticulous research on the psychoactive and dependence-producing properties of caffeine, sedatives, and other drugs of abuse. His caffeine research was particularly influential, demonstrating through controlled studies that caffeine produces genuine physical dependence and withdrawal symptoms, findings that contributed to the inclusion of caffeine withdrawal as a diagnosis in the DSM-5.
