Journalism and Public Education

BCSP’s public education program produces evidence-based, objective journalism, conversations, and courses about psychedelics. For twice-weekly news updates on psychedelics—ranging from science and culture to business and policy—subscribe to our newsletter The Microdose. 

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Public Education

The Center’s public education program offers online courses, original reporting, and public dialogue to inform policy makers, journalists, businesses, potential patients, and anyone curious about psychedelics in the United States and around the world.

Our basic online class will be presented as a massive open online course (MOOC) that concisely and comprehensively delivers material speaking to the complexity of psychedelic substances, including their healing capacities and their risks, and addresses centrally important aspects of history, biology, chemistry, psychology, and public policy related to psychedelics.

In the meantime, the substances page of our website provides an introduction to psychedelics themselves. Our resource database offers additional scientific articles, historical documents, and news stories.

The Ferriss-UC Berkeley Journalism Fellowships

Administered by the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, the Ferriss–UC Berkeley Psychedelic Journalism Fellowship offers fifteen $10,000 grants per year to journalists reporting in-depth print and audio stories on the science, policy, business, and culture of this new era of psychedelics.

In addition to underwriting individual stories, the fellowship aims to establish and nurture a new generation of journalists covering the front lines of this rapidly changing field. We’re looking for big, underreported, narratively compelling stories placed in rich political, economic, scientific, and cultural contexts. We are committed to supporting journalists from diverse backgrounds and of all nationalities.

To learn more about how to apply, click here.


2023 Ferriss-UC Berkeley Journalism Fellows

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Jess Alvarenga

Oakland, California
@jessalvarenga_

Jess is a podcast producer and journalist who enjoys investigative stories with a cultural element. They are currently developing a podcast with NPR about finding salvation in unexpected places and how they are regaining the things they lost from their Pentecostal upbringing in queer life. For the fellowship, Jess will be investigating the history of psychedelic-assisted conversion therapy.

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Katharine DeCelle

Saint Paul, Minnesota
@kateyonair

Katharine is a freelance audio producer, writer, and award-winning filmmaker based out of Saint Paul, Minnesota. She is the cofounder and codirector of WFNU Frogtown Community Radio in Saint Paul and runs the audio and video production company Sounds Powerful Productions. Katharine has created work for a variety of news and media organizations in the Midwest, focusing on stories that put a spotlight on the unseen or marginalized. For her fellowship, Katharine is working on an audio documentary about ketamine.

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Meryl Davids Landau

Boca Raton, Florida
@MerylDL

An award-winning, longtime independent journalist, Meryl has written for National Geographic, The New York Times, Prevention, O, the Oprah Magazine, Vice, Good Housekeeping, and numerous other publications. Frequent topics of her work include holistic health, women’s health, climate change, and, more recently, psychedelic therapy. She’s also the author of two mindfulness/yoga women’s novels, including the award-winning Warrior Won. For the fellowship, Meryl is working on a newspaper feature about psilocybin.

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Tonya Mosley

Los Angeles, California
@tonyamosley

Tonya is an award-winning broadcast journalist with a career that spans two decades. She is a co-host for NPR’s signature long-form program Fresh Air and the creator and host of the award-winning podcast Truth Be Told. Season 5 of Truth Be Told, “How to Get Free,” explores what the latest psychedelic renaissance means for the Black diaspora and how psychedelics can be used to find healing for those who’ve experienced PTSD due to racial trauma.

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Deena Prichep

Portland, Oregon

Deena Prichep is an award-winning freelance print and radio journalist. She reports regularly for NPR on subjects ranging from Lenten yoga to housing equity to chicken diplomacy, and is the coauthor of Kachka: A Return to Russian Cooking. For the fellowship, Deena will build on her years of reporting on religion and belief to look at the role of chaplains as psychedelic facilitators.

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Tiney Ricciardi

Montrose, Colorado
@tineywristwatch

Tiney is a journalist who joined The Denver Post in 2020, where she has honed a beat she endearingly calls “earthly delights.” That includes news and features about beer, cannabis, psilocybin, reality TV, and the great outdoors. No stranger to mind-altering substances, Tiney served as the first beer editor at The Dallas Morning News and as cohost of the Grapes & Grain podcast. She’s also a certified beer judge with a passion for live music. For the fellowship, Tiney is exploring the subject of youth drug education.

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Preeti Simran Sethi

Washington, DC
@simransethi

Preeti is an award-winning journalist and independent scholar focused on personal, social, and environmental change. Her work has appeared on outlets including The New York Times, NPR, and the BBC. She is the coauthor of sustainable business book Ethical Markets: Growing the Green Economy and the author of Bread, Wine, Chocolate: The Slow Loss of Foods We Love, about the loss of biodiversity in food and agriculture, named one of the best food books of 2016 by Smithsonian. For the fellowship, Preeti is working on a book proposal and article on what it means to decolonize psychedelics.

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Shaina Shealy

Washington, DC

Shaina is a senior producer at PRX’s Snap Judgment in Oakland, CA. In addition to Snap Judgment, her stories have been distributed by outlets including Public Radio International, NPR, and Reveal from the Center for Investigative Reporting. They’ve taken her to a thorn forest in India, mushroom houses in the Rwandan hills, and a home for retired movie stars in Myanmar. Her work has been supported by the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, the International Women’s Media Foundation, and more. For the fellowship, Shaina is reporting on ayahuasca rituals and political engagement in the Middle East.

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Anna Silman

New York, New York
@annaesilman

Anna Silman is a senior features reporter at Insider, where her work focuses on power, privilege, and social behavior. Previously she was a senior writer for New York Magazine’s The Cut. She has covered the rise and fall of millennial dream startups, the pitfalls of influencer culture, and the ramifications of ketamine being touted as a depression wonder drug. She is especially interested in how new technologies and societal trends affect our understanding of women’s physical, mental, and sexual health. For her fellowship, she will continue exploring the gap between hype and reality in the current psychedelics marketing boom.

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Webb Wright

Brooklyn, New York
@_webbwright

Webb Wright is a journalist from Colorado currently based in Brooklyn. He writes about psychedelics, drug policy, mental health, and artificial intelligence. His work has appeared in Vice, DoubleBlind, and other publications. He’s an alumni of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, where he wrote mainly about the burgeoning psychedelics industry and law enforcement in New York City. For the fellowship, Webb is writing a magazine story about the US Drug Enforcement Administration and psilocybin.


2022 Ferriss-UC Berkeley Journalism Fellows
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Ann Marie Awad

Denver, Colorado
@AnnAwad

Ann Marie is an award-winning independent journalist and podcast producer with more than a decade of experience in local news. Their work has appeared on NPR, Here & Now, and Life of the Law. As the creator and host of the podcast On Something, Ann Marie spent three years exploring the effects of rapidly changing drug policy on people’s everyday lives. They’re now working on a new podcast about psychedelics.

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Clayton Dalton

Santa Fe, New Mexico

Clayton is a writer and physician. He has written about the promise and peril of ibogaine for Wired, the complexity of medical testing for The New Yorker, exponential growth for The Guardian, iron metabolism for Nautilus, hospital overcrowding for Undark Magazine, and more. He hopes to never write about COVID-19 again. Clayton has a medical degree from Columbia University and trained at Harvard University. He lives in New Mexico with his wife, where he works in rural hospitals serving Indigenous communities. Clayton is working on a magazine story about psychedelics and a new paradigm of psychiatric treatment.

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Kimon De Greef

South Africa
@kimondegreef

Kimon is a freelance journalist from South Africa who has written for The New York Times, The Guardian, Guernica, National Geographic, and other publications, including a story on 5-MeO-DMT, a hallucinogenic substance derived from Sonoran Desert toads, for The New Yorker. He coauthored a book on abalone smuggling with a poacher who began writing a memoir in prison. He holds a conservation biology masters from the University of Cape Town and a journalism masters from New York University. He’s currently working on a book about psychedelics.

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Kenya Denise

Brooklyn, New York

Kenya is the cofounder and creative director of Domino Sound, a new production studio creating innovative, educational, and provocative multimedia. She wrote, directed, and executive produced the narrative audio drama The Cheat Code, and she was audio ep on photographer Naima Green’s prototype digital archive of queer New York, Skin Contact. For Kenya, imagination and experimentation are key. Due to relocation after Hurricane Katrina, she grew up in both New Orleans and the DMV. She is a disabled Scorpio who hates racism. She is also a psychonaut who throws amazing parties and currently resides in Brooklyn, NY.

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Olivia Goldhill

Los Angeles, California
@OliviaGoldhill

Olivia is an investigative reporter at STAT who has been reporting on psychedelic research and drug development since 2016. She’s interested in exploring how psychedelics fit within the existing model of health care and holding the industry to high standards to create the strongest protections for patients. Her previous reporting in this space includes investigating a potential magic mushroom monopoly and exposing sexual abuse in a psychedelic clinical trial. She is a 2021 EPPY Award finalist and a 2020 Livingston Award finalist. Before joining STAT, Olivia worked at Quartz in New York and The Daily Telegraph in London. In 2022, Olivia began work on a book for Bloomsbury called Psyched, about how emerging psychedelic therapies call into question the very foundations of the mental health industry.

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Tasmiha Khan

Bridgeview, Illinois
@CraftOurStory

Tasmiha is an independent journalist whose work has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, National Geographic, and Vox, among others. Currently, Tasmiha covers a wide range of topics related to health, race, politics, culture, and religion. In 2021, Khan was named a Fellow for Knight Science Journalism at MIT, a Religion News Service/Interfaith America Journalism Fellow, and a Higher Education Media Fellow at the Institute for Citizens and Scholars and Education Writers Association. Most recently, her reporting has been supported by the Pulitzer Center. She is working on a story about psychedelics and American Muslims.

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Manal Zahid Khan

Brooklyn, New York
@manalkhan07

Manal is an independent journalist who tells stories in words, photos, and video. Her work has been at the intersection of gender, culture, cinema, and psychedelics. Her fellowship project dissects the relationship between queer identities and psychedelics in the megacity of Karachi. She is a Falak Sufi Fellow of the Near Eastern Studies and Journalism program at New York University.

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Ernesto Londoño

Minneapolis, Minnesota
@londonoe

Ernesto is a journalist at The New York Times working on a book about the past and future of medicinal psychedelics that will be published by Celadon Books. Ernesto served as Brazil bureau chief at The New York Times from 2017 to 2022 and was previously a member of the Editorial Board, where he wrote about global issues. Before joining The Times, Ernesto worked at The Washington Post for nine years, where his assignments included covering the Pentagon, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the Arab Spring. Born and raised in Bogotá, Colombia, Ernesto is fluent in Spanish and Portuguese.

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Shayla Love

Brooklyn, New York
@shayla__love

Shayla is an award-winning freelance journalist based in Brooklyn. Previously, she was a senior staff writer at Vice News for five years where she wrote about health, science, psychology, and psychedelics. She has a master’s degree in science journalism from Columbia University, and her work has appeared in Mosaic, STAT, Undark Magazine, The Washington Post, Kenyon Review, The Atlantic, Vice, Harper’s Magazine, Gothamist, and others.

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Michael Mason

Tulsa, Oklahoma
@michael_mason

Michael is a journalist and the author of Head Cases: Stories of Brain Injury and Its Aftermath (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008). He is the founding editor of This Land Press, and his work has appeared in The New York Times, The Believer, Discover, and elsewhere. His current project is the nonfiction book called Psychonaut, which explores the architecture of psychocosmic experiences through a psychedelic crime story.

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Jonathan Moens

Rome, Italy
@jonathan_moens

Jonathan Moens is an Eritrean-Belgian science and investigative journalist based in Rome. He studied brain sciences in London and Paris, where he worked as a neuroscience research assistant, before pursuing journalism in New York. As a freelancer, he covers science, health, and environmental stories, which have been published in National Geographic, Undark Magazine, The Atlantic, and more. Jonathan is writing about a series of experiments in Europe using psychedelics as a treatment for patients in vulnerable states. He’ll examine the ethical, political, and scientific ramifications of these studies and hopes to produce a multimedia project merging long-form writing and photography.

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Rachel Nuwer

Brooklyn, New York
@RachelNuwer

Rachel is an award-winning freelance science journalist and author based in Brooklyn. She regularly contributes to The New York Times, National Geographic, Scientific American, and more. She often writes about conservation, ecology, and illegal wildlife trade, and more recently has expanded her beat to include psychedelic science as well. Her next book, I Feel Love: MDMA and the Quest for Connection in a Fractured World (Bloomsbury, June 2023), will explore the science, history, politics, and culture of MDMA. For the fellowship, Rachel wrote about ibogaine for National Geographic.

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Cassady Rosenblum

Thomas, West Virginia
@cassadyariel

Cassady is a writer from West Virginia and proud alumna of the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. In addition to being a 2022 Ferriss-Berkeley Fellow, she is also the 2022–2023 Opinion Fellow for The New York Times. She’s been fascinated by psychedelics ever since learning about her Beat Generation namesake, Neal Cassady, and is especially interested in writing about how psychedelics are spreading to red states and rural places. Cassady’s fellowship story ran in Rolling Stone magazine in June 2022. Read it here: “These Mormons Have Found a New Faith—in Magic Mushrooms.”

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Chris Walker

Denver, Colorado
@bikejournalist

Chris is a freelance journalist based in the Mountain West who specializes in narrative, long-form reporting. Over the past decade his work has spanned four continents, ranging from investigative journalism to arts and culture writing. His research into drug policy includes the 2020 narrative podcast series The Syndicate, about the rise and fall of a cannabis-smuggling empire in Colorado. Walker’s work can be found on his website. For his fellowship, Chris reported a four-part podcast digging into what’s going on with the two competing psychedelics ballot initiatives in Colorado.

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Ben Wyatt

South Orange, New Jersey
@benwyatt78

Ben is a British-born storyteller. Formerly a multimedia journalist and development executive for over a decade with CNN, Ben now tells stories across print, audio, and video for outlets including the BBC, The Guardian, Fast Company, and more. A recent graduate of The New School’s creative writing MFA program, his work has explored the effects of sport-related CTE and potential solutions psychedelic medicines may offer to those living with the condition.


Selection Committee

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Tristan Ahtone

@Tahtone

Tristan is a member of the Kiowa Tribe and is the incoming editor-at-large at Grist. He previously served as editor-in-chief at the Texas Observer and Indigenous Affairs editor at High Country News. He has reported for Al Jazeera America, PBS NewsHour, National Native News, NPR, and National Geographic. Tristan’s stories have won multiple honors, including investigative awards from the Gannett Foundation and Public Radio News Directors Incorporated. He also led the High Country News team that received a George Polk Award, an IRE Award, a Sigma Award, a Society of News Design Award, and a National Magazine Award nomination. A past president of the Native American Journalists Association, Tristan is a 2017 Nieman Fellow and a director of the MuckRock Foundation.

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Alan Burdick

@alanburdick

Alan is a senior staff editor on the science desk of The New York Times and is the author of Why Time Flies: A Mostly Scientific Investigation. His first book, Out of Eden: An Odyssey of Ecological Invasion, was a National Book Award finalist and won the Overseas Press Club award for environmental reporting. Alan has worked as an editor at several publications, including The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, and Discover. His writing has also appeared in Harper’s, GQ, Natural History, On Earth, Outside, and the Best American Science and Nature Writing anthology. He has been a Guggenheim Fellow and is the namesake of asteroid number 9291. He lives outside of New York with his family.

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Adizah Eghan

Adizah is a senior producer at VICE Audio where she edits and produces episodes for VICE News Reports. Prior to VICE, she worked at The New York Times, where she produced The Daily and 1619. Her award-winning work has also aired on Snap Judgment, Reveal, NPR, KQED, and elsewhere. Adizah also served as an audio editor for the 11th Hour Food and Farming Fellowship at UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism. She resides in Brooklyn, NY.