Brian Anderson
Brian Anderson, MD MSc, is a psychiatrist at Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital, and an Associate Professor of Psychiatry and of Palliative Medicine in the UCSF School of Medicine. He is a founding investigator at the UC Berkeley Center for the Science of Psychedelics, and he is affiliated with UCSF Neuroscape and the UCLA Ecological Medicine Initiative. At UCSF, he directs the Compassionate Use Research and Advocacy (CURA) lab, which conducts community-engaged clinical research and regulatory science that seeks to transform how we address suffering and despair among people living with serious and life-threatening illness. For the last 20 years he has studied and collaborated with entheogenic communities in several countries.
Matthew Ashley
Matthew Ashley is currently Professor of Christian Spirituality at the Jesuit School of Theology of Santa Clara University at Berkeley. Before that he was a professor of systematic theology at the University of Notre Dame. He did his doctoral studies at the University of Chicago Divinity School under the direction of David Tracy. He has written on German political theology, science and religion, and Christian spirituality, with a focus on Ignatian spirituality. He is currently completing a book on the spirituality of Pope Francis.
William Barnard
Dr. G. William Barnard is a Professor of Religious Studies at Southern Methodist University, in Dallas, Texas. His primary areas of research interests are the comparative philosophy of mysticism, contemporary spirituality, and consciousness studies. Professor Barnard’s most recent book Liquid Light: Ayahuasca Spirituality and the Santo Daime Tradition, published by Columbia University Press in 2022, focuses on a syncretistic, entheogenically-based new religious movement that emerged in Brazil in the mid-twentieth century. Professor Barnard is also the author of Living Consciousness: The Metaphysical Vision of Henri Bergson as well as Exploring Unseen Worlds: William James and the Philosophy of Mysticism.
Benjamin Breen
Benjamin Breen is an associate professor of history at UC Santa Cruz and the author of two books: The Age of Intoxication: Origins of the Global Drug Trade (2019) and Tripping on Utopia: Margaret Mead, the Cold War, and the Troubled Birth of Psychedelic Science (2024).
Katrina Debonis
Dr. Katrina DeBonis is an Associate Health Sciences Clinical Professor and the Vice Chair of Education in the Department of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA. An active clinician-educator, she is passionate about teaching the next generation of psychiatrists how to provide compassionate, evidence-based, and trauma-informed care for patients at UCLA and the West Los Angeles VA in Women’s Mental Health, Mood Disorders, and College Mental Health. She is currently involved in research on psilocybin for depression and end-of-life care, and has published on topics including psychedelic research, medical education, physician wellness, psychiatrists’ reactions to patient suicide, and the intersection of spirituality and psychiatry.
Abou Farman
An anthropologist, writer and artist, Abou Farman is author of On Not Dying: Secular Immortality in the Age of Technoscience, Clerks of the Passage and No Silence in the Afterlife.
He is co-founder of Art Space Sanctuary, Casa Ojala and the Shipibo Conibo Center of NY.
Mayanthi Fernando
Mayanthi Fernando is Professor of Anthropology at UC Santa Cruz. Her research interests include Islam and secularism; human-nonhuman entanglements; more-than-secular, more-than-multispecies ecologies; histories of the body and consciousness; liberalism and law; and gender and sexuality. She is the author of The Republic Unsettled: Muslim French and the Contradictions of Secularism (Duke, 2014) and co-editor of Trouillot Remixed: The Michel-Rolph Trouillot Reader (Duke, 2021). Her research veered into uncharted territory after a mischievous visitation by her then-recently-deceased cat, and she is currently finishing a second book called Companion Spirits: More-than-Secular, More-than-Human Worlds (Duke) on secularity, the Anthropocene, and possibilities for more-than-multispecies world-making. She has held residential fellowships at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, the School for Advanced Research in Santa Fe, and the Museum of World Cultures in Leiden, and has published in a wide array of academic journals and public-facing venues.
Alex Gearin
Alex K. Gearin (PhD) is a medical anthropologist whose research focuses on psychedelic usage in neo-shamanic and clinical contexts, exploring socio-cultural dimensions of experience. His book, Global Ayahuasca: Wondrous Visions and Modern Worlds (Stanford University Press, 2024) explores ayahuasca phenomenology through multi-sited ethnography in Australia, Peru, and China. He serves as Assistant Professor and Deputy Director at the Medical Ethics and Humanities Unit, The University of Hong Kong, and is currently a Visiting Scholar at Stanford University.
Anne Harrington
Anne Harrington is the Franklin L. Ford Professor of the History of Science at Harvard University, specializing in the history of medicine, psychiatry, neuroscience, and related behavioral sciences. She is the author of many articles, edited volumes, and four books, most recently, Mind Fixers: Psychiatry’s Troubled Search for the Biology of Mental Illness.. She is currently working on a new book that will tell the story of the equally troubled quest within science to make room for consciousness. There, her method will be to unpack the stories that unfold in the diverse places where conversations about consciousness happen (from coma care units to operating theaters to hospice centers to wildlife sanctuaries).
Ayize Jama-Everett
Ayize Jama-Everett is a novelist, community-based therapist, and guerrilla theologian with master’s degrees in Divinity, Psychology, and Fine Arts. His psychedelic work sits at the intersection of diasporic theology and clinical practice. He serves as a board-level advisor to Psychedelics Today’s VITAL program, advises UC Berkeley’s Center for Psychedelic Science, and guest lectures at CIIS’s Center for Psychedelic Therapies and Research. He coordinates a community research project examining Black people’s experiences in psychedelic-assisted therapy training. His forthcoming book, The Body Already Knows, argues that the body carries what the mind was told to forget; the question is whether the field is ready to listen.
Bob Jesse
Robert (Bob) Jesse is the convenor of the Council on Spiritual Practices and a founding member of the UC Berkeley Center for the Science of Psychedelics. He was instrumental in forming the psilocybin research team at Johns Hopkins University and has co-authored several of its landmark studies on the spiritual and psychological effects of psilocybin. His work focuses on the potential of psychedelics for the betterment of well people, beyond the medical-model treatment of psychiatric conditions.
Patricia Kubala
Patricia Kubala is a PhD candidate in socio-cultural anthropology at UC Berkeley. Her dissertation project, Psychedelic Reckonings, is a study of how concepts of ancestry, inheritance, and intergenerational transmission animate contemporary practices of working with psychedelics and plant medicines in the United States. Her research considers not only the promise but also the dilemmas involved in the project of laboring for a psychedelic “otherwise” — for an ethics, therapeutics, and metaphysics adequate to reckoning with planetary ecological crisis and unresolved legacies of epistemic and material colonial and settler-colonial violence.
Nicolas Langlitz
Nicolas Langlitz, a medical doctor by training, is an anthropologist and historian of science and medicine who uses ethnographic fieldwork to think through philosophical questions. He wrote three books: Chimpanzee Culture Wars: Rethinking Human Nature alongside Japanese, European, and American Cultural Primatologists (2020), Neuropsychedelia: The Revival of Hallucinogen Research since the Decade of the Brain (2012), and Die Zeit der Psychoanalyse: Lacan und das Problem der Sitzungsdauer (2005). He is Professor of Anthropology and director of the Psychedelic Humanities Lab at The New School for Social Research in New York.
Celina de Leon
Celina De Leon is the co-director of Posada Natura retreat center in Costa Rica, founder of Circle of Sacred Nature church, and co-founder of Natura Care Programs, an interdisciplinary addiction recovery program. She has 25 years of experience working with ayahuasca and has been a longstanding apprentice of an indigenous healer from the Amazon of Colombia for the past 17 years. She is an adjunct faculty at the Graduate Theological Union teaching at the intersection of psychedelics, entheogens, and spiritual care. She is also an international advisor to the Organization of Indigenous Outreach and Conservation where she supports capacity building for traditional medicine conservation, language revitalization, and indigenous led science initiatives in the Kamentsa indigenous community of Colombia. She holds a BA from Stanford University, an M.Div from Starr King School for the Ministry, and she was a Fulbright scholar in India.
Sara Lewis
Sara Lewis, PhD, LCSW is an anthropologist of religion and medicine, a psychotherapist, and co-founder of Memoru Center for Visionary Healing Arts, a licensed Colorado Natural Medicine Healing Center and Facilitator Training Program. As a Fulbright scholar, she conducted long term ethnographic research in India, culminating in her book, Spacious Minds: Trauma and Resilience in Tibetan Buddhism, which investigates how Buddhist concepts of mind shape traumatic memory and pathways to resilience. At Naropa University, Sara served as Associate Professor and Chair of Contemplative Psychotherapy and Buddhist Psychology. She co-founded the Naropa Center for Psychedelic Studies, and has trained upwards of 400 students in providing psychedelic-assisted therapy. In her clinical work she specializes in intergenerational and ancestral healing and extra(ordinary) transitions including birth, death, and spiritual emergence.
Luzia
Luzia was born Jewish, raised a Humanist and practiced Buddhist meditation most of her life. She participates in Native American ceremonies and adores Mother Ammachi. In 1987 she was enchanted by the Queen of the Forest and initiated into the church of the Santo Daime in 1989. She lived extensively in the Brazilian rainforest as an active member of the community of Ceu de Mapia, practicing herbology, “energetic healing” mediumship, and assisting in church services. Luzia also has a clinical practice specializing in Bio-energetic Analysis, a psycho-dynamic psychotherapy through the body. She is the founder and spiritual director of Ceu da Luz Divina, a Santo Daime church, and originator of Embodying Womanhood Rites of Passage in the New Era, a year long initiation program. For her 70th birthday Luzia made a video called the Crowning of the Crone, a tribute to the ancient bird tribe and celebration of elderhood. Her book, SoulTalk: Conversations at the Intersection of Psychotherapy and Spiritual Practice, will be out in fall 2026.
Mariavittoria Mangini
Mariavittoria Mangini, PhD, FNP has written extensively on the impact of psychedelic experiences in shaping the lives of her contemporaries, and has worked closely with many of the most distinguished investigators in this field. In 2007, she co-founded the Women’s Visionary Council, a nonprofit organization that supports investigations into non-ordinary forms of consciousness and organizes gatherings of researchers, healers, artists, and activists whose work explores these states. She is Professor Emerita in the School of Science, Allied Health, and Nursing at Holy Names University. For the last 50 years, she has been a part of the Hog Farm, a well-known communal family based in Berkeley and in Laytonville, California.
David Presti
David Presti is a professor of neuroscience at UC Berkeley, where he has taught neurobiology and psychology for 35 years. For a decade he also worked in the clinical treatment of addiction and PTSD at the San Francisco VA Medical Center. And for the last 25 years he has engaged in dialogue and teaching on science with Tibetan Buddhist monastic communities in India, Nepal, and Bhutan. He has taught in the California Institute of Integral Studies program in psychedelic therapy and research since the program’s inception and is a founding faculty member of the UC Berkeley Center for the Science of Psychedelics. His undergraduate education is in physics, chemistry, and mathematics, and he has doctorates in molecular biology and in clinical psychology. And he is author of the books Foundational Concepts in Neuroscience and Mind Beyond Brain, and of the edX public-education course Psychedelics and the Mind.
Aidan Seale-Feldman
Aidan Seale-Feldman is Assistant Professor of Medical Anthropology at the University of Notre Dame. Her work explores affliction and its treatments—psychiatric, therapeutic, spiritual, and anthropological. She has spent the past decade conducting ethnographic research in the Himalayas, a region with a long tradition of shamanic healing that has recently witnessed the rapid growth of psychiatry, counseling, and new forms of mental health governance. Her first book, The Work of Disaster: Crisis and Care Along a Himalayan Fault Line (University of Chicago Press, 2025), is an ethnography of an emergent “mental health crisis” in the aftermath of the 2015 Nepal earthquakes. Funded by the John Templeton Foundation, her current research investigates the incorporation of mystical experience into the lives of secular Americans and their therapeutic practices.
Todd Whitmore
Todd Whitmore is Associate Professor of Theology and Concurrent Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Notre Dame. He is author of Imitating Christ in Magwi: An Anthropological Theology, which is based on his fieldwork in Northern Uganda and South Sudan during the Lord’s Resistance Army conflict. Beginning in 2017, he has practiced as a Certified Addiction Peer Recovery Coach in Indiana. He is working on a monograph interpreting the opioid crisis in light of Dante’s Divine Comedy, tentatively titled, The Opioid Comedy: A Speculative Ethnography of Addiction and Recovery.