The goal of this series of reviews is to describe the study design, highlight the multi‐modal data available in the Collaborative Study on the Genetics of Alcoholism (COGA), and document the insights that these data have produced in our understanding of the lifecourse of AUD. COGA is an interdisciplinary project with the overarching goal of understanding the contributions and interactions of genetic, neurobiological and environmental factors towards risk and resilience over the developmental course of AUD, including relapse and recovery. COGA is a family‐based study 8 and members of large families (Figure 1), a subset of which are densely affected with AUD, have been longitudinally characterized 9 in clinical, behavioral, neuropsychological, neurophysiological and socio‐environmental domains, yielding a rich multi‐modal phenotypic dataset paired with a large repository of biospecimens and genetic data (Table 1 provides sample sizes). In this overview, we outline the motivation behind and design of COGA as a multi‐modal project. Accompanying this overview are individual reviews (2. Sample and Clinical Data, 3. Brain Function, 4. Genetics and 5. Functional Genomics) that provide in‐depth characterization of our clinical, behavioral,
