All building

Co-founder in 2020, Co-President in 2021–22. PsySci on CalLink

Psychedelic science at Berkeley in 2020 was a real field wearing a bad reputation. PsySci started as a group of students who wanted to take it seriously: to read the research, meet the people doing it, argue about the ethics, and talk honestly about harm reduction. We started on Zoom, in the middle of a pandemic.

The DeCal

Our for-credit student-run course, Introduction to Psychedelic Science (Psychology 198), covers the field from neurobiology and psychotherapy to anthropology and the history of psychedelics in the West, with guest lectures from researchers and practitioners. The first two iterations ran on Zoom. It is still running: see the DeCal listing and the current class on Berkeley’s class schedule.

Journal clubs and events

I gave our first journal club, on psychedelics, meditation, the default mode network and the sense of self. In March 2022 we hosted a Young Professionals in Psychedelics career panel, moderated by Dr. Jennifer Mitchell of UCSF Neuroscape, with researchers from UCSF and the Berkeley Center for the Science of Psychedelics.

Pseudodelica, Drugs as Powerful Allies, and LSD, Entropy and Meta-State Transitions.