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Collective Continuance: Indigenous Knowledge Fellowship Q&A with Marlena Robbins

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Q&A with Marlena Robbins


Marlena Robbins is a Doctor of Public Health candidate at the University of California, Berkeley, and Program Coordinator for the Collective Continuance Fellowship (CCF). Her research examines multigenerational perspectives on psilocybin mushrooms in urban Native communities and the development of the CCF as a model for ethical engagement in psychedelic research. Drawing on implementation science, Indigenous methodologies, and public health prevention theory, she studies how research design, governance, and training structures can shape the future of psychedelic science. She has contributed to tribal engagement strategies for the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) and served on the Colorado Natural Medicine Tribal Working Group.

In addition, Marlena was a co-author on the recently published paper, Indigenous Knowledge Systems & Psychedelic Science: Towards Ethical and Reciprocal Collaboration. BCSP financial support made the publication open-access, and we will continue to support future publications that center Indigenous voices, ethics and knowledge production in the psychedelic field.

BCSP

Can you tell us a bit about your research and your background in the psychedelic field?

Marlena Robbins

My entry into this work started with building a relationship with the medicine itself. When my dad was diagnosed with cancer, I wanted to understand psilocybin-assisted therapy for end-of-life care to help him with his transition. That experience led me to apply to the Doctor of Public Health program at UC Berkeley, where I began learning about ethnopsychopharmacology and the development of culturally informed psychedelic-assisted therapy for groups that identify with particular cultural traditions. 

My public health training pushed me to think beyond individual experiences and toward systems, institutions, and prevention. I started asking broader questions: How do these culturally grounded approaches intersect with Western mental health practices? Where do they align and where do they diverge? And what gets lost, or overlooked, when Western science becomes the primary framework for understanding healing?

How do we find balance, where both Indigenous knowledge systems and Western science are treated as valuable, with tools that can teach and learn from one another?

BCSP

How did you first get involved with the BCSP and the fellowship?

Marlena Robbins

I received the Indigenous Student Research Fellowship through the BCSP and both Dr. Tina Trujillo and Dr. Andrea Gomez became mentors to me. At a time when conversations about commercialization and exploitation of Indigenous communities were becoming more visible in the psychedelic space, it felt meaningful to see an initiative that centered Indigenous presence within an academic research environment. 

While the fellowship offered funding, it also signaled that Indigenous perspectives and methodologies belonged in scientific institutions as something worth investing in and learning from.

BCSP

How did this intersect with your dissertation work?

Marlena Robbins

The fellowship supported the early development of my dissertation research. One of my dissertation papers examines the first iteration of the Indigenous Student Research Fellowship and what emerged from that initial cohort. My second paper focuses on the continued development of the fellowship, which is now called the Collective Continuance: Indigenous Knowledge Fellowship. In that paper, I look at how the fellowship might serve as a broader model for the psychedelic field as it begins to ask more foundational questions: What does reciprocity look like in practice? What does ethical research actually involve when Indigenous knowledge systems are engaged? And how can Indigenous ways of knowing exist alongside Western science without being extracted, simplified or translated only on Western terms? This felt especially urgent in the psychedelic field, where interest is accelerating faster than shared ethical infrastructure.

BCSP

Tell us about your new role as the Collective Continuance: Indigenous Knowledge Fellowship program coordinator at the BCSP.

Marlena Robbins

I come into this role as a student first. I’m still learning, and I’m careful not to position myself as an expert. I’m holding this role as a doctoral candidate applying what I’ve learned over the past four years, and as a Diné woman carrying lived experience shaped by how and where I grew up. 

My intention is to help center Indigenous knowledge systems within psychedelic science because the field feels lopsided. Western scientific methods dominate, even when the medicines being studied come from Indigenous context with their own epistemologies and ethical frameworks. Part of my role is to help introduce these paradigms thoughtfully and gently while also asking the scientific community to reflect on its assumptions about what counts as valid knowledge.

There are ways of knowing that have been carried for thousands of years. The question I keep returning to is how do we find balance, where both Indigenous knowledge systems and Western science are treated as valuable, with tools that can teach and learn from one another?

BCSP

Who else is shaping the fellowship?

Marlena Robbins

We are working with a focus group of six Indigenous advisors who are helping to guide the fellowship’s design. We’ve shared insights from interviews with previous cohort members, conversations with BCSP staff and reflections from the fellowship’s earlier leadership, including Dr. Gomez, Dr. Trujillo, Dr. David Presti and Dr. Dacher Keltner. 

The advisors have been generous with their time, energy and ideas. Then the pilot cohort will also play an active role by testing the partnerships that we’re building, allowing us to learn from how the fellowship functions in practice and not just in theory.

BCSP

Tell us about the upcoming cohort of fellows.

Marlena Robbins

The pilot cohort will include two fellows. We’ll invite them to share their work and to help further shape the fellowship by reflecting on what felt supportive, what didn’t work as intended and what needs rethinking. This phase is intentionally iterative. The fellows are seen as contributors and co-designers of the program’s evolution. 

BCSP

The fellowship centers expertise, lived experience and relationship-based governance rather than relying solely on traditional academic hierarchy. Can you speak to the power of structuring the program that way? 

Marlena Robbins

The fellowship invites collaboration across roles including Indigenous researchers, advisors, scholars, scientists and traditional practitioners, all with space to lead and design. There is an Indigenous advisory council and there are the fellows, who are UC Berkeley students. Some may be Indigenous and some may not, but all are engaging seriously with the intersection of Indigenous knowledge systems and psychedelic science. Many fellows have been trained within a narrow scientific framework. This fellowship asks them to learn additional methods shaped by Indigenous methodologies, data sovereignty and ethical research practices. We also prioritize partnerships with Indigenous-led organizations that already hold this knowledge, instead of asking institutions to reinvent it. This approach is intended to prevent extractive research relationships, misuse of Indigenous knowledge and institutional practices that reproduce harm even when intentions are good.

BCSP

How does your experience as a doctoral student shape how you’re approaching the fellowship?

Marlena Robbins

My experience as a doctoral student strongly shapes how I approach this fellowship. Early-career researchers often face foundational questions such as how to refine research questions, select methods, navigate Institutional Review Board (IRB) processes, and understand the responsibilities that come with working across knowledge systems, questions I encountered firsthand when beginning my own multigenerational research. 

The fellowship is designed as an added layer of support for scholars whose training may not fully prepare them to engage Indigenous knowledge systems. For example, if a researcher hopes to work with Indigenous elders around psychedelic medicines, such as engaging Mazatec communities in conversations about psilocybin mushrooms, the research questions extend beyond methodology. How are relationships built over time? How is trust established? Who guides the research process? And who holds authority over how knowledge is shared and used? The fellowship creates space for researchers to think through these questions with careful approaches that are responsive to community contexts.

BCSP

How do you think about the fellowship playing a broader role in the psychedelic field?

Marlena Robbins

At a systems level, change begins upstream. If we engage students early and support them in developing research that takes Indigenous-centered perspectives seriously, the fellowship functions as a form of primary prevention at the level of research practice. Operating across individual, institutional and community contexts, it intervenes before extractive or unethical approaches become embedded, supporting research relationships built on accountability, responsibility and respect. This work is informed by socio-ecological approaches to prevention and public health ethics, which emphasize upstream intervention, systems-level change and the prevention of structural harm.

This interview was edited for length and clarity.

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Mycoskie-UC Berkeley Social Media Fellow Q&As: Solei Sarmiento

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Welcome to the BCSP’s interview series highlighting the perspectives of Mycoskie-UC Berkeley Social Media Fellows. Please note these interviews describe the experiences and perspectives of the fellows and do not necessarily reflect the views of the BCSP.

Q&A with Solei Sarmiento

Solei Sarmiento is a Master of Divinity student at Harvard Divinity School, where she studies integrative spiritual care through the lens of Mesoamerican traditional knowledge. Her work explores how ancestral practices can support individual healing and inspire organizational and systems-level transformation. She holds a B.A. in Cognitive Science from UC Berkeley, where she researched daily awe, contemplative ecological pedagogies and prosocial behavior. As director and co-founder of the nonprofit Sunflower Sutras, she co-creates projects with Indigenous elders, scholars and artists that weave storytelling, traditional knowledge and research to cultivate new forms of learning and leadership. She is committed to bridging research, ancestral knowledge and community practice to advance collective well-being. You can see her work from the fellowship at @sunflower.sutras.

BCSP

Tell us about your Mycoskie-UC Berkeley Psychedelic Social Media Fellowship project. What was your favorite part of the project? Did you learn anything that surprised you? 

Solei Sarmiento

The Sacred Medicines online conference–a collaboration between Sunflower Sutras, the Confederation of Amazonic Nationalities of Peru (CONAP) and International Consciousness Research Laboratories–served as the focus of my fellowship’s storytelling work. The project aimed to amplify Indigenous voices and explore ethical, decolonial approaches to psychedelics through thoughtful multimedia storytelling.

We structured this fellowship project in two interconnected phases. The first phase focused on the lead-up to the conference: We connected with elders, Indigenous young leaders and conference facilitators through interviews, while contextualizing the conference through educational carousel posts on decolonial research methodologies. The second phase highlighted select material from the conference itself—shared with the elders’ permission—including their reflections, as well as insights from participants on how the conference influenced their research, psychedelic practice or journey reconnecting with ancestral traditions. These narratives were shared via short-form videos and carousel posts, offering both intimate stories and accessible frameworks for understanding.

Through interviews, profiles and poetic carousels, we explored what bridging looks like in practice: how to uphold reciprocity, navigate cultural complexity and challenge extractive patterns while working across worlds. My favorite part was revisiting and editing footage with the elders, seeing how it connected with conference conversations and witnessing the collaborative energy this storytelling generated. It was especially meaningful to highlight voices like Ruro Caituro Monge, an Andean midwife, and bring perspectives on midwifery and community health into dialogue with broader audiences.

My favorite part was revisiting and editing footage with the elders, seeing how it connected with conference conversations and witnessing the collaborative energy this storytelling generated.

BCSP

What motivated you to apply for this fellowship? How does your personal background or lived experience inform your interest in psychedelic storytelling?

Solei Sarmiento

This project was co-created with Francisco Lopez Rivarola, co-founder of Sunflower Sutras. My motivation for applying to this fellowship grew from the meeting point between my training in contemplative sciences—where I first witnessed Western and Indigenous wisdom traditions in dialogue—and my desire as a Mexican-American to reconnect with my ancestral traditions. As a cognitive scientist in the field of contemplative sciences and chaplain-in-training, I see great beauty in cross-disciplinary, relational and culturally rooted knowledge-making.

This project emerged from two questions we saw resonating across many communities. First: How do we bridge Indigenous knowledge with Western hearts in ways that honor depth, context and reciprocity? And second: For people of color living in “in-between” identities—mixed-heritage, diasporic or mestizo—how can reconnection with ancestral traditions happen ethically, respectfully and with care?

Through conversations with elders and mixed-heritage scholars, we learned that navigating this terrain requires humility, relational accountability and a willingness to sit with ambiguity. Many emphasized that reconnection must arise through dialogue, consent and reciprocity—not through simply consuming traditions, but through showing up in ways that honor the communities who hold them.

From the outset, we were conscious of the long history of extractive research. Those of us in the new generation of contemplative researchers and psychedelic chaplains seeking to bridge Western and Indigenous knowledge systems must reckon with this history and move with great care, humility and respect. 

The conference we were documenting centered Indigenous elders and their teachings, and with their permission, we felt a responsibility to share insights at the heart of the gathering. Motivated by the ongoing lack of Indigenous and BIPOC representation in the psychedelic field, we saw educational storytelling—before, during and after the conference—as a powerful way to honor and amplify these voices, helping shape a more ethical, inclusive and culturally grounded psychedelic landscape.

BCSP

Do you see multimedia/social media posts playing a different role than traditional media in shaping public understanding and engagement in the psychedelic landscape?

Solei Sarmiento

Social media plays a distinct role in shaping public understanding by enabling direct engagement, interactive dialogue and broad accessibility. I believe that it has a unique way of fostering conversation and community. In the psychedelic space, dominant narratives often prioritize scientific or legal frameworks, sidelining traditional knowledge and relegating the sacred, lived traditions of Indigenous communities to merely “a folkloric experience.” Through this media project, we aimed to counter that mindset by highlighting traditional knowledge systems as central—not peripheral—to understanding these medicines and imagining how the movement might evolve. 

Because Indigenous perspectives have often been underrepresented on social media due to technological, accessibility and cultural barriers, we believe that amplifying their voices can meaningfully shift how the public perceives these traditions, bringing them closer and demystifying them in ways that even traditional media often cannot.

At the same time, these perspectives must contend with the realities of the digital landscape: noise, polarization and heightened risks of misrepresentation, especially in an era of AI-generated content. Our project asks: How can sacred knowledge be shared online without flattening its depth?

Despite the limitations of shorter-form content, social media remains a powerful entry point, one that can spark curiosity, inspire ethical reflection and create space for respectful engagement. Its visual, narrative and experiential forms invite a level of relational learning that traditional media alone rarely achieves.

BCSP

How do you work to create educational, balanced and ethical content while engaging audiences on controversial or misunderstood topics?

Solei Sarmiento

We approach this work by leaning into nuance rather than avoiding it. Bridging Indigenous and Western epistemologies is challenging given the legacy of pain and distrust. One of our guiding principles is approaching the work without a predetermined agenda—staying as faithful as possible to the messages and intentions of elders and collaborators. Media can serve as a bridge when crafted with care, collaboration and feedback. This process also involves acknowledging and unweaving colonized patterns in our own thinking and practice, ensuring the content fosters understanding without reinforcing harmful structures.

BCSP

What multimedia project (or creator) has moved you lately, in the psychedelic space or otherwise?

Solei Sarmiento

The recently released documentary Cobra Canoa, about Alvaro Tukano, one of the elders we worked with, beautifully demonstrates how to document living Indigenous traditions while honoring their depth and vibrancy. Directed by Enio Staub, it is an inspiring example of ethical storytelling. Outside the psychedelic space, I am drawn to @nowness on Instagram, which collaborates with global artists to communicate the beauty and complexity of the everyday through visual storytelling. I am inspired by creators who weave together intricate narratives through beauty, curiosity and ethical care, unafraid to engage with nuance.

This interview was edited for length and clarity.

Mycoskie-UC Berkeley Social Media Fellow Q&As: Charlotte James

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Welcome to the BCSP’s interview series highlighting the perspectives of Mycoskie-UC Berkeley Social Media Fellows. Please note these interviews describe the experiences and perspectives of the fellows and do not necessarily reflect the views of the BCSP.

Q&A with Charlotte James

Charlotte Duerr James is a visionary healer, ceremonial facilitator and founder of New Old Ways, a multidimensional learning space where ancestral wisdom, psychedelic ritual and collective liberation intersect. Rooted in both academic inquiry and embodied practice, Charlotte designs transformational experiences that honor intergenerational complexity and invite communities to heal across divides. Her work bridges lineages, identities and modalities, always with reverence, relationality and a deep belief in our shared power to remember, reconnect and reimagine. You can see her work from the fellowship at @newold.ways.

BCSP

What motivated you to apply for this fellowship? How does your personal background or lived experience inform your interest in psychedelic storytelling?

Charlotte James

Afro-diasporic stories and experiences of healing are so frequently left out of the mainstream psychedelic conversation. This often means that the medicines are not reaching our communities because we do not see ourselves included in the conversation about how these medicines, which frequently come from our own forgotten or rejected traditions, can support our healing. I see this as a continuation of the colonial project in which medicines are extracted from Indigenous peoples and cultures, but then monetized in a way that is largely un-accessible for the descendants of these Indigenous cultures. 

I was interested in highlighting how sacred Earth medicines and psychedelics can offer us a window into a different narrative about ourselves, our origins and our capacities than has been fed to us for many generations.

BCSP

Tell us about your Mycoskie-UC Berkeley Psychedelic Social Media Fellowship project. What was your favorite part of the project? Did you learn anything that surprised you? 

Charlotte James

My project is titled AfroPsychedelia and highlights the contributions of Afrodiasporic traditions and practitioners to contemporary psychedelic knowledge and practice. My intention was to create content that speaks directly to the Afrodiasporic experience and how working with sacred Earth medicines, which are a part of our ancestral traditions and technologies, can serve as a buoy while we traverse the sea of collective collapse, death and rebirth that we are in. Moreover, I was interested in highlighting how sacred Earth medicines and psychedelics can offer us a window into a different narrative about ourselves, our origins and our capacities than has been fed to us for many generations. This campaign was a practice of colonial deconstruction. My favorite part was creating the graphics, as this is one form of my own creative expression and storytelling. 

My research for the campaign made it even clearer to me how prevalent entheogens are within African traditional religions and spiritual lineages. We’ve just been quite intelligent and strategic about keeping them part of closed practice.

BCSP

Do you see multimedia/social media posts playing a different role than traditional media in shaping public understanding and engagement in the psychedelic landscape?

Charlotte James

I’m not sure I do, because of the widespread censorship that is happening around psychedelics on social media. It’s fascinating to watch large companies talking about breakthrough treatments and the medicalization of tradition without issue, while community care workers and practitioners have to jump through semantic hoops just to avoid being shadow-banned.

BCSP

How do you work to create educational, balanced and ethical content while engaging audiences on controversial or misunderstood topics?

Charlotte James

Nothing is going to speak to everyone, so my focus has really been on offering content that appeals to those who may already feel the call towards these medicines or who are at least open-minded and curious. I’ve also been offering a balance of more clinically leaning content, which is backed by research around the role psychedelics can play in healing identity- and race-based trauma, and more ancestrally rooted knowledge, with an infusion of personal storytelling from members of my communities that have experienced the healing power of these ancient medicines.

BCSP

What multimedia project (or creator) has moved you lately, in the psychedelic space or otherwise?

Charlotte James

Sita Ji has been activating her medicine community in Jamaica, the Medicine Family Gathering, to become a network of mutual aid and community care in the aftermath of Hurricane Melissa. I am endlessly inspired by her resiliency and continued sharing and storytelling of the very real impact that natural disaster has on people and place, and the ways in which connection to the medicine is enhanced when it’s truly integrated into a community.

This interview was edited for length and clarity.

Putting Ethics and Public Engagement at the Center of Psychedelics Exploration

Participants discuss ethics in psychedelic basic science research at the workshop
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Participants discuss ethics in psychedelic basic science research at the workshop
Participants discuss ethics in psychedelic basic science research at the workshop.

Berkeley, CA – Dec 16, 2025 — Scientific research is always a reflection of the world around it—our history, our values and our people. That is why researchers must do more than just observe; they must constantly look inward. Integrating ethics means practicing humility and accountability every day. It means asking: Does this work promote equity? Is it mutually beneficial?

This is critical in psychedelic science. As interest in psychedelics explodes, researchers on the cutting edge face unique ethical dilemmas. To move forward responsibly, they must ensure that the excitement for discovery is matched by a commitment to doing right by the community.

The BCSP’s core values inform work at the center. Within basic science, journalism, community-building, applied research and policy, the BCSP’s staff ask questions and support each other as they figure out how ethical and values-driven principles can be integrated directly into their work and the work of others in the field of psychedelic science.

On November 7, 2025, the BCSP and the Kavli Center for Ethics, Science, and the Public gathered 38 participants for a first-of-its-kind workshop designed specifically for psychedelic basic scientists: researchers who investigate the biological mechanisms of action of psychedelics. Organizers hoped to ask, how do diverse perspectives and disciplines shape psychedelic inquiry for basic research? How do incentive structures and operational environments shape research priorities in basic science? How can researchers make sure they’re doing research with communities and not just about them? How might needs, values, and insights from other disciplines and perspectives also shape basic science? How do those in the psychedelic field understand and integrate values such as equity, reciprocity and humility into their work?

“Unlike applied research, basic science research is often oriented towards discovery and foundational knowledge, rather than in direct response to a societal problem,” said Kuranda Morgan, strategy director and civic science fellow at the BCSP, who co-led the workshop alongside Jen Holmberg and Leana King, both neuroscience PhD students and graduate fellows at the Kavli Center for Ethics, Science, and the Public. “So how do we think about ways that neuroscience can be values-led, culturally attuned, and community-responsive when it can feel more upstream from the problems that society is experiencing?”

Being: Reflexivity in Research

How does one’s own disciplines affect them? How does background shape which issues someone is interested in, their methodologies and their audiences?

When talking about values-led work—and inviting lived experiences and community perspectives to influence that work—it’s important to examine one’s own history and training. That’s why the BCSP began the workshop by establishing context. Sylver Quevedo, who is the scientific director and chair of the board of directors for the Open Mind Collective, a faculty member at the UC Berkeley Center for the Science of Psychedelics and a principal investigator in an FDA trial of MDMA-assisted therapy for PTSD, provided theoretical grounding for the day’s discussion, orienting attendees to the strengths of different disciplines, both research that’s driven by the scientific method and research that’s driven by narrative and personal experience.

Next, participants wrote down one of their own values—humility, curiosity and creativity were stand-outs—and considered how it showed up in their work.

Participants shared their values and the ways they show up in their work

Becoming: Exploring psychedelic inquiry through different disciplines

What new opportunities emerge when different ways of knowing work together? What’s the impact of exploring (or not exploring) perspectives from disciplines different from one’s own?

Background, both professional and personal, shapes how researchers approach their work—which is part of why it’s so meaningful to learn from each other’s work in various disciplines. To that end, participants heard from three different speakers about how they view psychedelic inquiry.

Dr. Heather Kuiper, co-founder and director of the Center for Psychedelic Public Health, spoke about how to approach psychedelic inquiry as a public health issue, related to social and community health. If researchers think about psychedelics as potentially improving outcomes, then how can they establish equity within and across the research process?

Dr. Diana Negrín, a geographer and curator with a focus on identity, space and social movements in Latin America and the United States, explored how geographic, historic and sociocultural contexts shape how plant medicines are stewarded and used. As psychedelics continue to become more mainstream, how do researchers acknowledge how their growing popularity shapes the communities and geographies that they come from? How can researchers reflect on the role of their work in changing relationships between communities and the land?

Marlena Robbins, the program coordinator for the Indigenous Student Research Fellowship at the BCSP and a DrPH candidate at UC Berkeley, spoke about Indigenous knowledge as science. How can researchers respect and learn from Indigenous research ethics, including relational accountability, reciprocity, kinship and trust? What is the importance of cultivating a relationship with the plants themselves?

In breakout groups, participants discussed ethical tensions that came up in their work. Then, each group worked through one dilemma: What are the historical contexts, and forms of insight might add to it? What would it look like if the ethical dilemma was addressed, and what would be the adverse effect if it wasn’t?

“We went through the process of collective sense-making: studying a problem, how it manifests, and what it might look like to have it solved, with people who are different from you,” said Morgan. “That builds a cultivated awareness, which can inform how you think about administering a sacrament or diversifying your research study participants.”

Together, workshop attendees brought together those “flowers” to create a garden of ethical dilemmas.

 An example of an ethical dilemma explored in break-out groups
Participants created a garden of ethical dilemmas to learn about how others are navigating tensions in their work

Belonging: Approaches to ethics and engagement

What does it look like to be inclusive in a research practice? What approaches can successfully advance interdisciplinary work?

How others bring their backgrounds to their work can broaden one’s understanding of psychedelic inquiry—and lead to collaboration, both with other researchers and with subjects of research. The organized asked three speakers to discuss engaged medical research and how to pursue interdisciplinary work in the psychedelic field.

Dr. Lea Witowsky, executive director of the Kavli Center for Ethics, Science, and the Public at UC Berkeley, spoke about three projects that bridge science and society: the Kali Center graduate fellowship, which provides graduate students with ethical training; an event that bridged perspectives between the autism community (care-givers and self-advocates) and scientists studying autism; and an art residency focused on visualizing genetic data in textiles.

Dr. Brian Anderson, a psychiatrist at Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital and an associate clinical professor at the UCSF School of Medicine, spoke about how he co-designed a study about demoralization from long-term AIDS diagnosis with the community he researched, focusing on increasing connection through group therapy and dealing with trauma that didn’t qualify as PTSD through psilocybin therapy. Anderson shared how conversational spaces like town halls can steer research questions.

Dr. Bryan Howard, a co-founder of Oakland Hyphae, the first industry-recognized psychedelic testing lab, talked about the importance of trials outside of an academic setting to understand the potency and experiences of various psychedelic substances.

Moving forward

At the end of the workshop, participants gathered together to reflect on what they learned and specific actions that they could take to further develop ethical frameworks in their own research.

“The BCSP is really unique, in that we have these different disciplines: journalism, basic science, applied research, and convenings and events,” says Morgan. “Values-led ways of working are at the core of the BCSP’s identity, and we’ll continue thinking about how to imbue engaged practices, right relationship, cultural attunement and values into our work.” The workshop was a meaningful way to have those conversations—and just the beginning.

Mycoskie-UC Berkeley Social Media Fellow Q&As: Chelsea Coyle

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Welcome to the BCSP’s interview series highlighting the perspectives of Mycoskie-UC Berkeley Social Media Fellows. Please note these interviews describe the experiences and perspectives of the fellows and do not necessarily reflect the views of the BCSP.

Q&A with Chelsea Coyle

Chelsea Coyle is a brand strategist, community builder, and creative designer empowering psychedelic and wellness brands to grow purpose-driven movements. She has helped leading organizations build engaged communities of over 200,000 people collectively, fueled by strategic collaborations and storytelling across digital and in-person channels.

As community manager for the Microdosing Collective, Chelsea drives initiatives for safe, legal access to microdosing psychedelics. She’s also the founder of Psychedelic Genius, launched as an inaugural winner of the Mycoskie–UC Berkeley Psychedelic Social Media Fellowship, which focuses on normalizing psychedelic careers and helping newcomers find their zone of genius.

Chelsea advises psychedelic clinics, wellness brands and thought leaders, turning inspiration into action through storytelling, design and community-driven strategy, helping people find their place, purpose and power within the psychedelic and wellness movement. You can see Chelsea’s fellowship work on Instagram.

BCSP

What motivated you to apply for this fellowship? How does your personal background or lived experience inform your interest in psychedelic storytelling?

Chelsea Coyle

I was actually sent the fellowship page by a close friend and colleague the night before it was due. The moment I read the description, I felt like it was made for me. Needless to say I was up until 2am building my application. I’ve always been fascinated, borderline obsessed, with studying what makes content and communities successful: the kind that sparks conversation, encourages intentional reflection and creates a deeper connection to something that can make a meaningful, positive impact on the world. I believe there’s room for every voice in this space, and I knew this fellowship was the perfect opportunity to begin shaping mine.

A big part of why I’m so passionate about psychedelic storytelling is that I believe both subjective lived experiences and objective science are essential to advancing this movement and providing safer, broader access for those who need it most. These two pillars shaped my own introduction to psychedelics, and while my experiences were mostly positive, I know not everyone has that opportunity. I want to help ensure that people approaching these medicines do so with safety, community, intentional expression and a focus on destigmatization.

Social media pushes us to be extremely strategic and compelling, grabbing attention in the first two seconds of a video or the first line of copy, while also asking the bigger question: What story are we telling over time, broken into digestible pieces?

BCSP

Tell us about your Mycoskie-UC Berkeley Psychedelic Social Media Fellowship project. What was your favorite part of the project? Did you learn anything that surprised you? 

Chelsea Coyle

My project, Psychedelic Genius, is dedicated to normalizing career pathways within the psychedelic field and supporting people who want to enter the industry in a professional, informed and meaningful way. As with any emerging and still-stigmatized area, psychedelic medicine needs intentional support in helping people build careers where they can contribute their unique strengths (their own “genius”) toward making a positive impact.

For the purpose of this fellowship, the project is beginning with a focus on interview-driven content, learning from professionals who have already established their careers in the space. In the long term, Psychedelic Genius aims to become a hub for individuals passionate about contributing to the science, policy, business and culture of psychedelics.

My favorite part of the Mycoskie–UC Berkeley Psychedelic Social Media Fellowship project was getting to fill a gap in the industry that I felt was absolutely essential. It gave me the freedom to explore my own creative pursuits in a self-directed way, while collaborating with an incredible, curated team. Each of us was practicing what it truly means to work in our zone of genius: from creative direction and graphic design to copywriting and video editing. Every piece of content we produced had intentionality behind it, and in my experience, that’s the kind of work that creates the greatest impact over time.

What surprised me most was how supportive the community has been. I came into the project feeling nervous about how my work would be received, but the psychedelic community, and specifically the people I’ve been surrounded by, have embraced it. It reinforced a big lesson for me: Hard work and thoughtful creation pay off in meaningful ways.

BCSP

Do you see multimedia/social media posts playing a different role than traditional media in shaping public understanding and engagement in the psychedelic landscape?

Chelsea Coyle

In today’s social media world, attention spans are shrinking, and while that can get a bad rap, I actually see it as an opportunity for creatives who know how to adapt. Social media pushes us to be extremely strategic and compelling, grabbing attention in the first two seconds of a video or the first line of copy, while also asking the bigger question: What story are we telling over time, broken into digestible pieces? Public understanding on social media comes from steady and compelling learning, asking for consistent engagement rather than long engagement right away.

Traditional, longer-form media is just as important but serves a different role. If social media is the appetizer, long-form content is the full-course meal: the deep dive, the textbook, the space for the seeker and the passionate learner. Both are needed to leave the table full. And as creatives, it’s our job to make sure the whole meal is delicious.

BCSP

How do you work to create educational, balanced and ethical content while engaging audiences on controversial or misunderstood topics?

Chelsea Coyle

Educational: I base statements in research whenever possible, but I also highlight lived experiences. Storytelling is most powerful when it invites curiosity, both from me and from the audience. I approach each piece as a chance to explore a question, spark reflection, and guide people toward deeper understanding.

Balanced: I’m always willing to acknowledge the “shadow” side—the risks, limitations or controversies—because trust comes from honesty. No topic is entirely positive, and embracing complexity creates credibility.

Ethical: For me, ethics start with intention and dialogue. I create not to lecture, but to invite conversation and collaboration with the community. I’m willing to be wrong, iterate and reflect on my own intentions, asking myself, “Am I creating to genuinely make a positive impact, or just checking a box?” This reflection guides every decision, ensuring content is responsible, engaging and meaningful.

BCSP

What multimedia project (or creator) has moved you lately, in the psychedelic space or otherwise?

Chelsea Coyle

Psychedelics.com: They do an incredible job capturing the science, business, culture, policy and practice of psychedelic medicine. Their content meets people at crucial points in their journey and is designed to optimize for the most positive and thorough experience possible. I especially appreciate their mycelium mindset: the way they amplify the work of both large and small creators. To me, this reflects a deep understanding of how important it is to elevate all voices in the space and cultivate a well-rounded, thriving industry.

House musicians: Music and movement fuel my creative process. Whether I’m attending live shows and mixing music in my down time or integrating music into my workflow, it helps me operate at the vibe I want to express through my work. Here’s a playlist.

Atmos: Nature is a huge source of inspiration for me. Seeing immersive, mission-driven content that sparks action reminds me why storytelling matters. Their visuals, copy and overall storytelling are a constant reference point for the quality and intentionality I strive for in my own projects.

This interview was edited for length and clarity.

Mycoskie-UC Berkeley Social Media Fellow Q&As: Xochitl Bernadette Moreno

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Welcome to the BCSP’s interview series highlighting the perspectives of Mycoskie-UC Berkeley Social Media Fellows. Please note these interviews describe the experiences and perspectives of the fellows and do not necessarily reflect the views of the BCSP.

Q&A with Xochitl Bernadette Moreno

Xochitl Bernadette Moreno is a Xicana filmmaker, ceremonialist and media maker whose work bridges ancestral wisdom, social justice and community healing. A longtime activist and co-founder of Essential Food & Medicine and Esphera, she creates films and rituals that restore connection to land, spirit and culture. As co-host of KPFA’s La Onda Bajita, the longest running Chicano radio show in the country, and creative director of Earth Amplified Media, she weaves art and activism through sound, ceremony and storytelling. Her current feature documentary, Ancestral Medicine: Healing the Streets, explores how formerly incarcerated and unhoused people use ancestral and psychedelic medicine to recover from trauma.

Follow Xochitl’s work on Instagram @ancestralmedicinefilm and @xochicana.

BCSP

What motivated you to apply for this fellowship? How does your personal background or lived experience inform your interest in psychedelic storytelling?

Xochitl Bernadette Moreno

I applied to the Mycoskie–UC Berkeley Fellowship because it felt like an opening to tell stories at the crossroads of healing and justice. I come from a lineage of storytellers and healers: My great-grandfather, Antonio Garduño, was one of Mexico’s pioneering photojournalists whose early work documented the Mexican Revolution. His photographs captured Pancho Villa and Emiliano Zapata in moments of power, pause and people’s struggle, helping to define the visual memory of that era. He later became a trailblazer of fine-art and erotic photography, exploring beauty and freedom of the human form in ways that were radical for his time.

I’ve spent my adult life collaborating with community medicine keepers and people surviving incarceration and addiction. Psychedelic storytelling allows me to honor both the scientific curiosity of this moment and the ancestral practices that have sustained our peoples for centuries. My own experience working with ceremony and mutual-aid networks has taught me that recovery isn’t just personal—it’s communal, relational and deeply spiritual.

The fellowship reminded us that we are not working in isolation; there is a growing network of practitioners, storytellers and scientists all moving in the same direction.

BCSP

Tell us about your Mycoskie-UC Berkeley Psychedelic Social Media Fellowship project. What was your favorite part of the project? Did you learn anything that surprised you? 

Xochitl Bernadette Moreno

My fellowship project centered on Ancestral Medicine: Healing the Streets and the work of the Holistic Detox & Recovery Support System (HDRSS). We created a multimedia campaign connected directly to the film’s production, sharing stories and educational content about ancestral medicines like kambo, ayahuasca, iboga, 5-MeO-DMT and the sweat lodge as pathways of recovery for people rebuilding their lives after incarceration or homelessness.

The campaign became a bridge between the online community and the in-person movement. It allowed us to share updates from the field while cultivating real dialogue about decolonizing healing and the intersections of trauma, addiction and ceremony. My favorite part was witnessing how those digital stories found their mirror in human-to-human encounters at the Psychedelic Science 2025 conference in Denver, where members of the psychedelic research and community-care worlds came together around shared values of respect, reciprocity and cultural grounding.

What encouraged me most was the response: from people who felt seen, to researchers and clinicians seeking new models for community-based recovery. The fellowship reminded us that we are not working in isolation; there is a growing network of practitioners, storytellers and scientists all moving in the same direction. It strengthened our commitment to continue documenting these stories and following the mission of bridging ancestral knowledge and contemporary healing in authentic, ethical ways.

BCSP

Do you see multimedia/social media posts playing a different role than traditional media in shaping public understanding and engagement in the psychedelic landscape?

Xochitl Bernadette Moreno

Yes. Traditional media often presents psychedelics through academic, scientific or clinical frameworks, focusing on new studies, therapies and policies. Yet much of this conversation overlooks the deep, continuous lineage of Indigenous communities who have practiced with sacred plants and earth medicines for thousands of years. Their traditions are the original research, passed down through ceremony, song and relationship with the land.

Meanwhile, in urban contexts, there’s also a living psychedelic culture of the streets: people healing through community, creativity and survival long before it was recognized as “psychedelic therapy.” These two worlds—the ancestral and the institutional—often speak different languages.

Multimedia storytelling has the potential to bridge that divide. A short film, a reel or a digital story can transmit both the immediacy of lived experience and the depth of ancestral continuity. It can help viewers recognize that the psychedelic renaissance didn’t begin in research labs, but in jungles, deserts, sweat lodges and the collective memory of Indigenous peoples.

The task is to create narratives that honor both sides: the rigor of science and the wisdom of lived and ceremonial experience. Social media can humanize the research, ground it in community and remind audiences that healing isn’t just about innovation—it’s about remembering. For me, it’s a portal where empathy, evidence and ancestry meet.

BCSP

How do you work to create educational, balanced and ethical content while engaging audiences on controversial or misunderstood topics?

Xochitl Bernadette Moreno

I treat every post as an offering. Before creating, I ask, does this honor the people and medicines represented? I collaborate with elders, cultural advisors and clinicians to ensure that our storytelling is accurate, grounded and respectful of the traditions it touches.

When we share about sacred plant or animal medicines, we include both the clinical research and the cultural lineage behind them. We avoid sensationalism by emphasizing relationship over spectacle—centering the people and communities who carry these traditions, not just the substances themselves.

This also means humanizing populations who are often left in the shadows: people in recovery, those who’ve been incarcerated or unhoused and Indigenous practitioners whose knowledge predates modern “psychedelic science” by millennia. By showing their resilience, wisdom, and humor, we challenge stigma and open space for empathy.

Ethical storytelling, for me, is not just about avoiding harm. It’s about cultivating reciprocity and reverence. It’s a slow process of listening, giving credit and sharing the responsibility of representation so that healing can be seen in its full, human complexity.

BCSP

What multimedia project (or creator) has moved you lately, in the psychedelic space or otherwise?

Xochitl Bernadette Moreno

I’m continually inspired by Monica Cadena, an Afro-Chicana storyteller known as @sacred.alchemist whose work fuses poetry, ritual and digital strategy to center Black, Brown and Indigenous healing. Beyond her creative reels and essays, she’s also written on psychedelics and culture for outlets like Doubleblind, bringing rigor and heart to the conversation. 

At Bioneers, I’ve been moved by the portrait work around the Indigeneity Program, especially the leadership and photography of Cara Romero (Chemehuevi), whose images honor Native presence with contemporary power and who helps steer Indigenous storytelling at the conference. 

And the film Eskawata Kayawai: The Spirit of Transformation (directed by Lara Jacoski and Patrick Belem) stays with me: a seven-year documentary about the Huni Kuin’s cultural and spiritual renaissance and their relationship with Nixi Pae (ayahuasca), guided by leaders like Ninawá Pai da Mata. It’s a luminous example of reciprocity and community-led media.

This interview was edited for length and clarity.

New Findings from Second UC Berkeley Psychedelics Survey

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Note: This article was originally published on 06/17/2025; it has been updated to include additional methodological details and update certain sections for clarity and accuracy.

In 2023, Michael Pollan, Imran Khan, and their team launched the pilot of a ground-breaking public perception survey about psychedelics to learn if psychedelic news, research, and education efforts such as those at the UC Berkeley Center for the Science of Psychedelics (BCSP) informed mainstream culture and voters’ perceptions about the use of psychedelics in society. The BCSP is grateful for the generous support of donors that allowed for a second administration of the survey in April 2025. 

A new team—BCSP Executive Director Andrea Venezia, Postdoctoral Researcher Tyrone Sgambati, and Civic Science Fellow Kuranda Morgan, along with Dave Metz and Miranda Everitt, Partners at FM3, a public opinion, research, and strategy firm—led the second administration of the survey for this ongoing public perception research project. 

On June 18, the research team presented initial findings at Psychedelic Science 2025 in Denver. Since then, the team has been conducting deeper analyses and will release further findings and implications in early 2026. 

Highlights from Initial Findings 

Proximity to the use of psychedelics

The BCSP asked respondents if they or someone close have used a psychedelic at some point in their life. The BCSP called this metric proximity to the use of psychedelics.  

  • Most respondents reported proximity to the use of psychedelics. A majority of respondents, 55%, reported that they or someone close to them have used psychedelics at some point in their lives, up from 52% in 2023. 
  • Proximity to use increased for some demographics between 2023 and 2025.  Compared to 2023, proximity to the use of psychedelics by self-reported political conservatives rose from 43% to 50%. Self-reported liberals stayed steady, going from 64% in 2023 to just 65% in 2025ns. Like conservatives, older respondents (65+) also reported an increase – from 34% in 2023 to 46% in 2025. Black voters reported the largest increase over the two-year time period, from 26% to 42%. 

Shifts in support for psychedelics policy proposals

The BCSP is tracking how support for different policy proposals concerning psychedelics is changing over time. As part of that effort, in both 2023 and 2025 we asked voters how much they would support or oppose several policies.

Note: See the final methodological bullet section at the end of this release for information on changes in item wording over time.

  • There is strong support for certain legal uses of psychedelics. In 2025, the majority of voters either somewhat or strongly support making it easier for scientists to study psychedelics (81%), allowing therapeutic access to be legal (72%), obtaining federal approval so that people can access psychedelics as prescription medicine (66%), and removing criminal penalties for personal use possession of psychedelics (51%). Notably, voter support increased significantly over time for all of these propositions, except removing criminal penalties for personal use possession of psychedelics.

Who voters believe should have access to psychedelics

We also asked voters what level of access to psychedelics – between remaining illegal with no access at all, regulated therapeutic access, or removal of criminal penalties for possession and use – they deemed appropriate for several different groups of people.

  • More than half of respondents believe certain groups should have regulated therapeutic access to psychedelics. More than half of respondents said military veterans (56%), people with depression (61%), and people with addiction (55%) should have regulated therapeutic access. Less than half believed people receiving end of life care (48%) or all adults 21 and over (38%) should have this kind of access. 
  • Removal of criminal penalties was not seen as the most appropriate level of access for any group. Among the groups we asked about, the largest number of respondents (38%) thought it was appropriate to remove criminal penalties for people who are receiving end-of-life care and use psychedelics. The fewest number of respondents (11%) thought it was appropriate to remove criminal penalties for people with addiction. 
  • Respondents had the most permissive attitudes towards people receiving end-of-life care. A combined 86% of respondents believed it was most appropriate for people receiving end of life care to either have access to regulated therapeutic access to psychedelics or for criminal penalties for possession and use of psychedelics to be removed for this population.

Support for psychedelics education in high school

As proximity to psychedelics increases in society, the BCSP wanted to learn if respondents thought it would be helpful to have programs to educate high school students with factual, scientific information about benefits and risks associated with psychedelics. This is a new area of inquiry for the UC Berkeley Psychedelics survey. 

  • Almost two-thirds of respondents are at least somewhat supportive of educating high school students about the risks and benefits of psychedelics.  More than half of respondents (65%) support the idea, with 34% indicating strong support and 31% indicating that they are somewhat supportive. Support for psychedelic education programs also cut across race/ethnicity, with all racial/ethnic groups assessed reporting over 60% combined “somewhat” and “strong” support (62% for Indigenous respondents, 63% for White respondents, 66% for Asian Pacific Islander respondents, 72% for Latino respondents, and 76% for Black respondents). 

How the BCSP Collected, Analyzed, and Reported These Data

  • The data in this release come from two probability samples of registered U.S. voters contacted at random using information available in voter registration lists. The 2023 sample consists of 1,500 voters and the 2025 sample consists of 1,577 voters. 
  • All reported proportions and differences are based on data that are weighted (gender, ethnicity, age, region, education and political affiliation) to approximate the characteristics of the underlying population of registered U.S. voters. 
  • Unless noted with a superscript “ns”, all of the percentage differences (i.e., changes between 2023 and 2025) presented in this release are statistically significant at the 5% level.
  • The exact wording describing each policy proposal to respondents changed between 2023 and 2025 as our team worked to reduce measurement error for future administrations of the survey. Although these changes in wording were minor, it is impossible to rule out the possibility that shifts in support are partially or fully attributable to them. More detail about these changes will be available in our forthcoming report.

Rana Freedman Named Communications Director of the UC Berkeley Center for the Science of Psychedelics

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Berkeley, CA – Dec 2, 2025 — The UC Berkeley Center for the Science of Psychedelics (BCSP) has named Rana Freedman as its new Executive Director of Communications, a role that will guide the Center’s strategic communications and voice as it continues to advance psychedelic research for the public good.

Freedman brings more than 25 years of experience in communications, marketing and content development across the nonprofit, philanthropic and higher education sectors. Throughout her career, she has worked to amplify mission-driven organizations and translate their priorities into clear, engaging stories. She’s passionate about connecting people to science in ways that inspire understanding and trust, reflecting the BCSP’s values of integrity, transparency, equity, reciprocity and curiosity—principles that inform all its work.

In her new role, Freedman will oversee the BCSP’s communications strategy, strengthening its visibility as a trusted source on the science and cultural understanding of psychedelics.

“We’re excited to welcome Rana to the BCSP,” says Andrea Venezia, Executive Director of the Center. “Her extensive experience and creative vision will elevate our work and help us connect with new audiences seeking thoughtful and balanced information about psychedelics and their potential benefits.”

“I’m thrilled to join the BCSP at such an exciting time,” says Freedman. “As public curiosity about psychedelics grows, the BCSP’s commitment to rigorous science, multidisciplinary inquiry, and open dialogue are more important than ever. I look forward to collaborating with this talented team—and our partners—to help more people understand the research and its potential impact.”

Before joining the BCSP, Freedman served as Director of Digital and Social Media Marketing at the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, where she led a team in translating cutting-edge science and AI through digital storytelling. She also spent nearly a decade at the University of California Office of the President, leading integrated marketing strategies that highlighted the University’s research, public service and impact across California and beyond.

Freedman earned her B.A. in religion from Oberlin College.

For media requests for the BCSP, contact Rana at 510-664-5938 or BCSPmedia@berkeley.edu.

Listen to Season Two of Altered States

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The UC Berkeley Center for the Science of Psychedelics (BCSP) and Pulitzer-winning public media organization PRX today announced a new season of Altered States, a podcast exploring psychedelics as the center of global conversation about mental health, mysticism, and even how we experience life and death. Altered States debuted in August 2024 and was named a nominee in The Webby Awards for best science and education podcast of 2025.

The new season begins September 24, free on-demand across all major podcast listening platforms:

Read transcript

Sughra Ahmed [00:00:03] The medicine was offered to me in what looked like a goblet, which took me by surprise, you know, in a clinical study. 

Hunt Priest [00:00:12] I began to make sounds that weren’t words, that seemed to mean something, and I remember thinking in the moment, is that what’s talked about in Scripture, speaking in tongues? 

Sughra Ahmed [00:00:25] You get to pop a pill and then meet God. Our saints didn’t just pop a pill. 

Arielle Duhaime-Ross [00:00:28] There’s a lot of disagreement over psychedelics and how these substances should be used. Are they party drugs, medicines, religious sacraments, or maybe even a dress rehearsal for death? 

Rick Strassman [00:00:42] Very visual, very emotional memories come back. You know, DMT has those kinds of effects as well. 

Eben Alexander [00:00:48] These are sharp, clear, crisp, absolute, reliving the events more powerfully than when we lived through them in the earthly realm. 

Arielle Duhaime-Ross [00:00:59] I’m Arielle Duhaime-Ross, and on this season of Altered States, we’re exploring two distinct worlds within psychedelics. On one side, there’s the realm of spiritualists, mystical experiences, and psychedelic churches. And on the other side are scientists, clinical trials, animal studies, and psychopharmacologists. These two factions are often far apart, and even at odds. 

Michael Pollan [00:01:25] The mixing of science and religion is just kind of explosive and makes people very uncomfortable. Scientists think religion is kind of woo-woo and not serious. And religious people think psychedelics are a synthetic version of what is really profound and sacred and shouldn’t be messed with. 

Arielle Duhaime-Ross [00:01:44] Team science is formidable. There are hundreds of clinical studies underway testing new treatments for physical and mental illnesses. 

Marissa Raymond-Flesch [00:01:54] If you have a severe and enduring mental illness, your mind kind of gets stuck in ruts. You can imagine like a sled going through the snow over and over and in the same circle. Psilocybin is like if you had that in a snow globe and you shake the snow globe. 

Arielle Duhaime-Ross [00:02:08] And then there’s team religion. 

Eben Alexander [00:02:11] The first gulp in the glass of natural sciences will lead you towards atheism, but at the bottom of the glass, God is waiting for you. 

Andre Voiceover [00:02:20] We take this medicine, travel to the spiritual world, and we see what is hurting this person, and we’re able to help heal the body. 

Arielle Duhaime-Ross [00:02:30] In the U.S., religion has an imposing player on its roster, the First Amendment. Psychedelic churches around the country are claiming constitutional protections. 

Steve Urquart [00:02:39] Some people could say, oh, so you started a church to get around drug laws. I mean, maybe. Maybe that’s a way that you want to say it, but I think that’s very incomplete answer. 

Arielle Duhaime-Ross [00:02:52] Think of this as the science versus religion season, two potential paths towards expanded, legally protected access to psychedelics. 

Michael Pollan [00:03:00] That this can come as a result of a chemical produced by a mushroom. I mean, how extraordinary is that? 

Arielle Duhaime-Ross [00:03:07] From the UC Berkeley Center for the Science of Psychedelics and PRX, this is season two of Altered States, launching September 24th. 

Hosted by acclaimed journalist Arielle Duhaime-Ross, upcoming episodes of the podcast will explore two camps in the world of psychedelics: science and religion. On the spiritual side, the podcast will bring audiences stories of newly founded psychedelic churches, clergypeople, and ambassadors from an Indigenous group from the Amazon. Listeners will also hear from neuroscientists, psychopharmacologists and even a pediatrician.

“I was captivated by the first season of the Altered States podcast — educational, entertaining, deeply researched, and creative,” said Michael Silver, Faculty Director of the BCSP. “This season explores fundamental questions about experience, knowledge, and well-being. We can’t wait for listeners to hear it.”

The first episode of the new season will delve into the long-awaited results of a Johns Hopkins University study that gave over two dozen religious leaders from various faith backgrounds high doses of psilocybin. The guide for this episode is renowned journalist and BCSP co-founder Michael Pollan, who weighs in on whether science can ever truly measure mystical experiences.

Additional episodes of Altered States will investigate the role music plays in a psychedelic trip, what we know and don’t know about the dying brain, the imperiled state of the Amazon rainforest, efforts to save a disappearing cactus in Texas, testing psychedelics as a treatment for eating disorders, and beyond.

Find both Altered States and The Science of Happiness free across podcast listening platforms including Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, Pocket Casts, Overcast, and NPR One. 

Meet the Altered States Team

Arielle Duhaime-Ross
Host

Arielle Duhaime-Ross is a science journalist, podcast host, and TV host based in Portland, Oregon. Their work has appeared on Vox, The Verge, Quartz, Scientific American, and on VICE News Reports, the outlet’s flagship news podcast, which they hosted for three years.

Duhaime-Ross was also the first climate change correspondent in American nightly TV news. They spent three years covering climate stories from around the world, for HBO’s VICE News Tonight. At VICE News, Duhaime-Ross later hosted a TV show called Queer Sports, as well as an award-winning podcast named A Show About Animals, which tackled the controversy surrounding ape language research in the 1970s and Koko, the gorilla.

Photo of Malia Wollan
Malia Wollan
Executive Producer

Malia Wollan is editor in chief of journalism projects at BCSP and director of the UC Berkeley-11th Hour Food and Farming Journalism Fellowship at UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism. She is a contributing writer at The New York Times Magazine. Her work has also appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, National Public Radio, New York Magazine, Fast Company,The Associated Press,PBS’s Frontline/World, and elsewhere.

Jocelyn Gonzalez
Executive Producer


Jocelyn Gonzales is executive producer of PRX Productions. Previously, she was executive producer of Studio 360, the Peabody Award-winning radio show and podcast. She produced the Popcast and Book Review podcasts at The New York Times for 10 years, and worked on podcasts for American Public Media, Hello Sunshine, and others. She has contributed reporting and production to outlets such as Radiolab and Marketplace. She’s produced audiobooks at Simon & Schuster Audio, and mixed independent films and animated shorts. Gonzales is a long-time faculty member of the film and TV department at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, and is a senior producer and engineer at Feet In Two Worlds, an award-winning non-profit journalism program focused on reporting in immigrant communities.

Adizah Eghan
Senior Editor


An audio producer and editor with over ten years of experience in podcasting, public radio, and digital media, Adizah Eghan was most recently the executive producer of the podcast  VICE News Reports. Prior to VICE, she worked at The New York Times where she produced The Daily and 1619. Her work has also aired and been featured on Snap Judgment, Reveal, National Public Radio, KQED, and elsewhere. 

Jennie Cataldo
Senior Producer

Jennie Cataldo is an award-winning radio and podcast producer living in San Francisco. She has been producing audio stories and programs since 2011, including commercial and public radio programs, audio documentaries, short form audio series, specials and podcasts. Jennie has worked with clients such as the United States Library of Congress, NPR’s 1A, UC Berkeley’s Greater Good Science Center, the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum, as well as NOVA, Google, Patagonia and The Peabody Awards through her work with PRX. Her work has been recognized yearly at the New York Festivals International Radio Awards since 2015, where she won the Grand Award in 2022 and also serves as a Radio Awards Advisory Board member. She loves music, collects vinyl records, and drives a pastel yellow convertible because life is short.

Cassady Rosenblum
Researcher


Cassady Rosenblum is a journalist based in Taos, New Mexico. Last year, she was a Fellow at The New York Times, where she primarily edited guest essays for Opinion. In 2022, she was a Ferris-UC Berkeley Journalism Fellow, and wrote about Mormons finding a new faith in magic mushrooms. When she’s not producing Altered States, you can find her writing about psychedelics and spirituality for Rolling Stone or working on her new magazine, Thunder Perfect Mind. 

headshot of Jade Abdul-Malik
Jade Abdul-Malik
Associate Producer


Jade Abdul-Malik is a journalist and producer who loves learning about the human experience. She’s worked on shows about the prison industrial complex, untold stories about America’s race to the moon, and how injustice impacts us all. Her favorite food is raw oysters. 

Edwin Ochoa
Project Manager


Edwin Ochoa is the director of partner operations at PRX. He has worked as project manager on productions such as Monumental, The Recipe with Kenji and Deb, The Joy of Why, and Smithsonian Magazine’s There’s More to That. In addition to project management, Edwin works across the PRX portfolio of podcast and broadcast shows. 

Additional credits: Our audio engineers are Terence Bernardo and Jennie Cataldo. Fact-checking by Graham Hacia. Our theme music is by Thao Nguyen and Nate Brenner.

Trends in the Psychedelic Field from Psychedelic Science 2025

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seven members of the BCSP staff standing in front of a white poster
Members of the BCSP team at Psychedelic Science 2025

In June, staff and members of the BCSP community joined others in the psychedelic space at Psychedelic Science 2025. Over four days, we met with leaders and thinkers with different perspectives, and left inspired about the future of psychedelics. Here are four of our takeaways from the conference about where the psychedelic field is headed in 2025 and beyond.

Keeping Purpose at the Center in a Quickly Changing Field

Andrea Venezia, Executive Director of the BCSP

This was my first time at the MAPS conference, so I wasn’t sure what to expect. It was a wonderful place to meet up with familiar faces and start to create new professional relationships. While there, I met with Julie Santos, the founder and head of Chicha Collective and the recruiter who worked with me when I applied to the BCSP. She was so gracious to check in and see how my first year at the BCSP is going. She left me with some wisdom about the field, based on her work with over 20 organizations in this space. I’m sharing this quote with permission: “The number one thing that destabilizes organizations in the psychedelics field is when people within the organization inject their personal passions or agendas into the organization’s work without ensuring they’re aligned to the main goals or mission of an organization.” Flipping that a bit, I think one thing that helps an organization fulfill its mission is having a clear sense of purpose and then aligning work and roles with that purpose—while still allowing for new ideas to take hold and grow. It sounds simple, but it can be hard to achieve, particularly in an environment with growth and uncertainty. 

In time for the Denver conference, we had just completed a strategic review process of the BCSP with a focus on clarity of values and principles, mission, vision, roles, work pillars, strategies, and activities. Her comment was a great reminder of the importance of our team’s recent work around organizational clarity and coherence, aligned with our mission and the impact we hope to have in the world. We unveiled our enhanced vision and mission with a small group in Denver, and I’ll share them here, along with the values and principles that guide us. 

We envision a world in which progress in psychedelic research, public education, policy, and practice lead to improvements in health and well-being. Our mission is to advance and share psychedelic discovery for the public good. We serve as a leading trusted source for scientific and interdisciplinary inquiry that informs knowledge and decision-making about psychedelics. 

In all that we do, the BCSP is guided by these values and principles: acting with integrity and transparency, conducting rigorous research, serving as responsible stewards of public resources, embodying equity and reciprocity, approaching our work with curiosity, and treating people with care and respect.

If you wish to learn more, please contact us at psychedelics@berkeley.edu. As my colleagues share in their reflections as well, we’re all thinking about the best ways for the BCSP to help bring coherence and enhance the public good in a quickly moving field.

Make Space for What’s Still Emerging

Tony Martin, Program Director at the BCSP

Photo of Tony Martin

If there was one recurring theme at Psychedelic Science 2025, it was this: the field may be growing faster than it is grounding itself. Throughout the week, I heard conversations that resisted simple categories about how science might be informed by culture and how care could help shape research. People seemed to be yearning for a more integrated approach, where science, culture, and community aren’t separate, but braided in practical and meaningful ways.

As Program Director at the BCSP, I often wonder how we can support that kind of integration. This field is unique not just in what it studies, but in how it asks us to engage across disciplines, identities, and ways of knowing. I came into the conference holding a question: If, as many believe, these substances invite us to think, relate, and organize differently, how might that influence how we structure the field itself?

Across the many panels and presentations, what stayed with me most were the moments between them: catching someone’s eye after a vulnerable audience question; running into an old colleague and falling into a spontaneous exchange; sitting cross-legged on the carpet with strangers, all of us still absorbing what had just landed. A reminder that some of the most meaningful connections aren’t planned, they emerge when we make space for them. 

At MAPS, space for deeper connection could be hard to come by. The energy was high, the rooms full, the schedule overflowing. So the BCSP made our own and hosted a small event we called The Space Between. The gathering was shaped by our values of reciprocity, curiosity, and community engagement. People shared about their hopes, their fears, and their questions. What are we integrating into? What are we willing to release? What are we longing for?

I left Denver more energized about the BCSP’s role in this evolving ecosystem. I hope we can not only help interpret and advance the field but also tend to it, by investing in the slow work of partnership, supporting narrative as a form of public education and repair, and by building programs that listen as much as they speak. I hope we can keep listening for what’s beneath the surface, and remember to ask: What are we centering? Who are we designing for? And how might we make space, not just for what we know, but for what’s still emerging?

The BCSP can’t answer every question, but we can help keep open the spaces in between. We hope to meet you there.

Ground What We’re Learning in What We’re Doing

Kuranda Morgan, Civic Science Fellow at the BCSP

It’s been a year since I started working in the field of psychedelics science, and this conference came at a turning point: In the field, community members are still making sense of setbacks to FDA approval and state level regulation for psychedelic-assisted therapies. In our center, we just launched a new strategy focused on advancing psychedelic discovery for the public good. Personally, I’m closing out my time as a Civic Science Fellow interested in understanding and advancing the connections between psychedelic science and society.

What I see as the biggest opportunity—and biggest challenge—within this field is the diversity that exists within it: of perspectives, histories, ways of knowing, approaches to inquiry, lived experiences, and expression. These varied viewpoints have differing visions for how psychedelics should be used, studied, discussed, and regulated. These tensions, often rooted in complex histories that encompass harm and inequity, along with healing and transformation, were very palpable at the conference, which led to conversations that were both enriching, and at times, conflicting. 

Over the course of one day, I attended sessions that featured conversations on lessons learned from drafting and implementing drug reform legislation. I listened to an exploration of contexts that make the recreational use of psychedelics on the dance floor a therapeutic experience. I learned about barriers and enablers to communicating the complexity of psychedelic science, and about the role that tools like data visuals can have in combatting misinformation. I heard about the challenges of integrating psychedelic-assisted therapy and use into a healthcare system that is focused on individuals and pathologies, rather than communities or the environment.  And I puzzled over how to make sense of it all and integrate learning into my own work and practice (a fitting challenge, since the conference’s theme was “integration”).

This complexity is a lot for me to grapple with and learn from, and I know many others in the field are moving through it as well. Yet, amidst this, there is also immense promise. I’m reminded of complex problems from other fields and how they’ve been strategically and systematically addressed, underscoring the importance of mission-driven, values-led approaches to spark change in the psychedelic ecosystem. 

The BCSP launched its new strategy at the conference: to advance psychedelic discovery for the public good. As we continue to hone our work across our work pillars of Journalism, Basic Science, Culture and Community, and Applied Research and Policy, I’m considering the vital role that the BCSP can play in synthesizing, sense-making, and field-building across our areas of work. We hope to help others navigate this complexity and mobilize this diversity of perspective in psychedelics discovery with rigor, care, integrity, and curiosity. 

In practice, this means grounding what we’re learning in what we’re doing: using insights on current developments and gaps in the evidence in psychedelic policy-making to help steer our unique contributions to the field (like our live psychedelic policy tracker and psychedelic public perceptions survey). It means demonstrating how well-curated visual aids can make difficult concepts, like how psychedelics affect neural pathways in the brain, easier to grasp. It means engaging with people where they are in their understanding of psychedelics use to share new insights into their benefits, risks, expression, and safe consumption. And it means helping tell evidence-based stories that provide nuance and enable public education through our journalism work. 

Facing the Future of Psychedelics with Resolve and Determination

Michael Silver, Director of the BCSP

Photo of Michael Silver

I found Psychedelic Science 2025 to be invigorating and inspiring. I am very grateful to MAPS for the huge amount of effort and resources they have devoted to creating these gatherings over the years, which have fostered connection, dialogue, learning, and growth in our field.

There were certainly fewer participants and less buzz this year compared to Psychedelic Science 2023, but this seems to me to reflect the chemistry that has occurred in our field since then. Increases in temperature have caused more volatile parts of the psychedelic brew to evaporate, leaving behind a concoction composed of people and groups with higher boiling points and with resolve and determination to keep advancing and contributing to the world of psychedelics.

I was filled with pride while witnessing the outstanding presentations, interviews, and panel discussions by members of the BCSP community: from announcing the results from our latest survey of public perception of psychedelics, to an overview of the innovative research happening in Gül Dölen’s lab, to discussion of visualization of results from psychedelic neuroscience research, to analysis of the emerging “Psychedelic Beat” in journalism, to exploration of the roles of art and creativity in the future of psychedelics. The BCSP’s faculty, staff members, graduate students, postdoctoral researchers, and fellows beautifully spanned the range of our Center’s pillars and programs at Psychedelic Science 2025, which in turn reflects the extraordinary breadth of perspectives and approaches in the field of psychedelics.

Through many conversations at the conference and at our exhilarating “The Space Between” event, I gained a deeper understanding of the ways in which the BCSP is now regarded within the field of psychedelics. I heard terms like “beacon,” “flagship,” and “gold standard” used to describe our Center, and it was heartwarming for me to hear how people perceive the BCSP to be a trusted source of credible information about psychedelics that is both comprehensive and publicly accessible.

The BCSP is now in the final stages of a systematic review of our strategic plan, led by our Executive Director Andrea Venezia. This process has created more clarity about our Center’s purpose, scope, mission, values, and aspirations. The BCSP’s planning for Psychedelic Science 2025 was one of the first opportunities we have had to apply our new strategic plan to a collective effort by our Center, and I was very encouraged by our process and communication.

As we look forward to celebrating the BCSP’s fifth birthday later this year, we are excited to continue making our strategic plan a reality, and I deeply appreciate everyone who has supported us along the way.

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