Psychedelics in Society and Culture

Psychedelics in Society
and Culture Fellowship Program

The Psychedelics in Society and Culture Fellowship program supports scholars and creators working on the cultural, historical, and societal dimensions of psychedelics. Designed to foster interdisciplinary research, public education, and community engagement, the initiative serves as a platform for exploring how psychedelics intersect with various aspects of human experience. The program aims to advance dialogue and expand public understanding of psychedelics’ role in society.

To learn more about how to apply, click here.

About the Fellowship Program

The Psychedelics in Society and Culture Fellowship Program is a collaborative initiative between the UC Berkeley Center for the Science of Psychedelics (BCSP) and the Center for Interdisciplinary Critical Inquiry, in partnership with Harvard University’s Mahindra Humanities Center. While much research on psychedelics has focused on their therapeutic potential, this program supports collaborations that explore the intersections of psychedelics and humanistic inquiry with a focus on the following goals:

• Deepen understanding of psychedelics’ historical, cultural, and societal roles, as well as their broader implications for human experiences.
• Explore psychedelics across diverse histories, cultures, and geographies to expand scholarship and contribute to the growing field.
• Foster collaboration and intellectual exchange among scholars and institutions through shared learning opportunities.
• Support innovative scholarship that advances knowledge of psychedelics’ complex roles in society and culture.

The fellowships provide grants of up to $45,000 to support projects across the arts, humanities, and social sciences. Recipients of these fellowships are known as Flourish Fellows. This initiative funds projects by UC Berkeley undergraduates, graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, and faculty. We encourage collaborations with our partner initiative at Harvard, but such collaborations are not required. Collaborative projects involving non-affiliated contributors may be eligible when a UC Berkeley-affiliated researcher formally sponsors and oversees the work.

Flourish Trust, the Center for Interdisciplinary Critical Inquiry and the BCSP gratefully acknowledge the invaluable contributions of Indigenous participants and other community collaborators, whose perspectives and efforts enrich this initiative and exemplify the principles of reciprocity and inclusion. As the flagship project of the BCSP’s Culture and Community pillar, the Psychedelics in Society and Culture fellowship program reflects its mission to deepen our understanding of psychedelics, their impact on human experiences, their diverse histories, cultural meanings and connections, and their significance across different societies.

2025 Psychedelics in Society and Culture Fellowship Cohort

Luc Virgili Phan

Bridging Psychedelic Rituals with VR Set and Setting through Fractal Geometry: Explores how virtual reality might support culturally informed psychedelic therapy by examining the principles of ritual design, specifically drawing from Santo Daime traditions. By integrating qualitative research, computational modeling, and abstract fractal geometry, the project aims to build a prototype of a VR experience that evokes ritual structure without appropriating specific cultural symbols, with guidance from engaged practitioners.

Luc Virgili Phan is an undergraduate student in the College of Letters & Science at UC Berkeley. With a background spanning mathematics, cognitive science, and digital media, Virgili Phan’s work explores the intersections of technology, perception, and ritual. His academic interests include computational aesthetics, consciousness studies, and the cultural dimensions of immersive design. Virgili Phan has previous research experience in data science and neurodegeneration and is particularly drawn to the creative and ethical potential of emerging technologies in shaping human experience.

Hillary Brenhouse

Elastic: Elastic is a print magazine and cultural initiative committed to a truly expansive, inclusive vision of psychedelic art. Through its second issue, publishing in spring 2026, and a series of live events, the project will bring together a vast body of contemporary psychedelic work while paying tribute to an often overlooked creative archive. An expanded public program will deepen cross-disciplinary dialogue, spotlight performance and other art forms that can’t live on the page, and offer a platform for artists, scholars, and others to explore the shape—and future—of modern psychedelic culture.

Hillary Brenhouse is a Montreal-based writer and the editor and publisher of Elastic, a magazine of psychedelic art and literature. Formerly editor-in-chief of Guernica and editorial director at Bold Type Books, she also curated the Guardian’s Antiracism and America series. Her writing—focused on reproductive health, capitalism, and cultural memory—has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, and Time. She holds degrees from McGill and NYU, and toggles between critiquing the cartoonish popular vision of psychedelia and the poor information available on cannabis use in pregnancy.

Marlena Robbins

Multigenerational Perspectives of Psilocybin Mushrooms in Urban Native Communities
This project explores how Native people across generations understand and relate to psilocybin mushrooms in contemporary urban contexts. Drawing on in-depth interviews with Native participants ages 18 to 80 in the South and Northwest United States, the study examines how perspectives on psilocybin have shifted over time, across eras shaped by counterculture movements, criminalization, stigma, cultural loss, and renewed interest in healing.

The research looks at how spirituality, recreation, trauma, cultural reconnection, and community norms shape attitudes and experiences. The project aims to contribute to more culturally informed public health conversations about psychedelics and to further the understanding of how historical context and generational experience influence healing practices today.

Marlena Robbins is the Program Coordinator for the Indigenous Student Research Fellowship. She is a DrPH candidate at UC Berkeley specializing in Indigenous knowledge, psychedelic science, and mental health policy. She has contributed to SAMHSA, the Colorado Natural Medicine Tribal Working Group, and BCSP Certificate Training Program. Marlena’s work blends policy analysis, multigenerational Native perspectives, and human-centered design to support ethical, community-led approaches to psychedelic-assisted therapy in Native-serving health systems.

Maria Silk

On the Floor: A performance-based research project exploring the role of psychedelics in queer nightlife during the early days of the HIV/AIDS epidemic. Through a public artist talk and a series of oral history interviews, the project will trace how psychedelic substances and practices shaped experiences of grief, pleasure, and community on the dance floor.

Maria Silk is a Ph.D. student in Performance Studies at UC Berkeley. Silk’s practice as a choreographer and artist emerges from a decade of experience within Bay Area queer nightlife as a drag performer, DJ, and producer. Her performance and video work exploring the relationship between queer history, desire, and power has been presented at local venues including BAMPFA, CounterPulse, Slash, and Southern Exposure as well as internationally at Fierce Festival (Birmingham, UK) and Improspekcije (Zagreb, Croatia).

Stephanie Young and Ramsey McGlazer

Poetics and Plant Medicine: This yearlong public reading series brings together poets, experimental prose writers, and scholars working at the intersection of aesthetics and psychedelic culture. Through cross-disciplinary conversations, “Poetics and Plant Medicine” aims to speak to audiences both within and outside the academy. Events will feature creative readings and critical dialogues that encourage inclusive, intellectually rigorous explorations of psychedelics in a time of cultural transition.

Stephanie Young is Associate Teaching Professor at Mills College at Northeastern University. Her books of poetry and prose include Ursula or University, It’s No Good Everything’s Bad, and Pet Sounds, which received a Lambda Literary Award. Her current manuscript traverses higher education in post-austerity, evolving psychedelic subcultures, and the making of new kinships. An excerpt appears in Bæst: A Journal of Queer Forms and Affects. Her scholarship has been published in The Los Angeles Review of Books, American Literary History, and the Post45 Data Collective. She is co-author of Crowd Control: Riot and Literary Reward, forthcoming from Columbia University Press. She serves on the Krupskaya Books editorial collective and co-authors the Substack Touch of Grey with Clive Worsley. Young is a member of Sacred Garden Community Church.

Young will co-curate the series with Ramsey McGlazer, who is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at UC Berkeley. He is the Senior Editor of Critical Times and the author of Old Schools: Modernism, Education, and the Critique of Progress (2020), which won the American Association for Italian Studies First Book Prize in 2021. McGlazer has translated a number of books from Spanish, including, most recently, Rita Segato’s The War Against Women (2025), and his public writing has appeared in The Los Angeles Review of Books, n+1, Parapraxis, and Post45 Contemporaries. He is working on a book about aesthetics and radical psychiatry, especially in Italy and Brazil.

Roshanak Kheshti

Psychedelics and Synesthesia: An ethnographic research project that investigates how psychedelic users narrate synesthetic experiences and challenges the default framing of these phenomena as hallucinations. The study explores how cultural context shapes interpretations of psychedelic perception, particularly in relation to sound, movement, and ritual with the key output being an audio essay, drawing from interviews and soundscape recordings.

Roshanak Kheshti is an Associate Professor in the Department of Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies at UC Berkeley. Trained as a cultural anthropologist, Kheshti’s work engages feminist and queer theory, critical race studies, sound studies, and performance ethnography. Kheshti is the author of Modernity’s Ear: Listening to Race and Gender in World Music (NYU, 2015), Switched-On Bach (Bloomsbury 33 ⅓, 2019) and We See with the Skin (Duke UP, forthcoming). Current research focuses on synesthesia, psychedelics, and sensory methodologies, with an emphasis on comparative ethnography and non-visual ways of knowing.

David Presti and Wendy Tucker

Shulgin Archive Exhibit at UC Berkeley: A public exhibit crafted from the archives of Ann and Alexander Shulgin, exploring the history of MDMA. This exhibit will bring vital awareness to the Shulgins’ singular role in psychedelic history. We hope this project will serve as an entrée to a groundbreaking effort to preserve local psychedelic history within UC Berkeley’s archival holdings.

David Presti is a professor of neuroscience at UC Berkeley, where he has taught biology and psychology for more than 30 years. He has doctorates in molecular biology and in clinical psychology, and is author of Foundational Concepts in Neuroscience: A Brain-Mind Odyssey and Mind Beyond Brain: Buddhism, Science, and the Paranormal, and creator of the public-education course Psychedelics and the Mind.

Presti is joined by Wendy Tucker, daughter of Ann Shulgin, who spent many years working closely with Sasha Shulgin on his research. She owns Transform Press, and manages a chiropractic office. Tucker has spearheaded the effort to preserve the Shulgin Farm and founded The Shulgin Foundation in 2023, a nonprofit dedicated to that work. She currently serves as its Board Chair and Executive Director. Other project contributors include Alysiana Carter, a doctoral student at the Graduate Theological Union, brings scholarly and archival expertise to the project, supporting research, annotation, and communications, and Peter Vitale, an advisor to the Shulgin Foundation with over two decades of expertise in psychedelic heritage, media, and community organizing.

2024 Psychedelics in Society and Culture Fellowship Cohort

Beatrice De Faveri

Flourish Scholar

Beatrice De Faveri is a third-year PhD student in the Department of Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures at UC Berkeley, specializing in Egyptology. She received both her BA and MA in Italy, in classical archaeology (University of Padua) and ancient cultures (University of Bologna) respectively. Since 2019, she has been a member of the archaeological mission to Qift of the Institut Français d’Archéologie Orientale (IFAO). Her main research interests lie in ancient Egyptian magical and funerary texts, with a special focus on the study of rituals. Her research also extends to the relationship between ancient Egyptian ritual texts and the material culture produced by the performance of ritual practices.

Her project, “Psychotropic Substances in Ancient Egypt Ritual Practices,” seeks to enhance understanding of the use of psychotropic substances in ancient Egyptian rituals. It will focus on researching the ritualistic use of the lotus flower and mandrake within the contexts of funerary, magical, and religious texts.

Charles Hirschkind

Flourish Fellow

Charles Hirschkind is a professor of anthropology at UC Berkeley. His research interests concern religious practice, media technologies, and emergent forms of political community in the Middle East and Europe. His published books include The Ethical Soundscape: Cassette Sermons and Islamic Counterpublics (Columbia, 2006), Powers of the Secular Modern: Talal Asad and his Interlocutors (co-edited with David Scott, Stanford, 2005), and The Feeling of History: Islam, Romanticism, and Andalusia (Chicago, 2020).

His Flourish Fellowship project, “Sensorium, Embodiment, and Modes of Perception: a Case Study of a Psychedelic Church” contrasts spiritual and material perceptions of psychedelic experiences within the Ayahuasca religion Santo Daime in Brazil and the U.S. It studies perceptual modes and body techniques through fieldwork and ethnographic filmmaking.

Kyle Jackson

Flourish Scholar

Kyle Jackson is a PhD candidate in the Department of History at UC Berkeley. His research interests include the political economy and culture of the 19th-century Americas, the international engagement of the American South, and the US in the world more broadly. His dissertation project, Port of Call to Arms: New Orleans and the Greater Caribbean in the Long Nineteenth Century, examines the rise of US global power through the prism of a city that was a focal point for the emergence of US imperialism and pan-American capitalism.

Exploring the roots of psychedelic subcultures in urban Americas, his project, “Searching for Psychedelic Experiences in Nineteenth-Century Cities,” involves preliminary research in New Orleans, laying the groundwork for a broader transnational study comparing psychedelic movements across Western Hemisphere cities.

Diana Negrín

Flourish Fellow

Diana Negrín da Silva, PhD is a geographer, educator, and curator who currently teaches in the departments of Geography and Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley. Her work is anchored to her lifelong dialogue between California and Jalisco, where she was raised and continues to conduct the bulk of her scholarship and teaching. Since 2003, she has conducted ethnographic and archival research in the Mexican states of Jalisco, Nayarit, and San Luis Potosí with a primary focus on the social and political activism of Wixárika University students and young professionals, and the politics of race and identity construction in Mexico. Her current research examines interracial and cross-geographic alliances that mobilize around Indigenous culture and territory, with a specific focus on resource extraction and land use changes in the sacred pilgrimage site of Wirikuta.

Her initiative, “Psychedelic Cultures and Extractivism in Sacred Territory,” seeks to document the impact of global entheogen commodification on sacred Indigenous lands caused by agro-industrial expansion and peyote tourism with a focus on the preservation of Indigenous rights and the defense of ancestral lands against extractive practices.

Mariavittoria Mangini

Flourish Fellow

Mariavittoria Mangini, PhD, FNP has written extensively on the impact of psychedelic experiences in shaping the lives of her contemporaries and has worked closely with many of the most distinguished investigators in this field. She is one of the founders of the Women’s Visionary Council, a nonprofit organization that supports investigations into non-ordinary forms of consciousness and organizes gatherings of researchers, healers, artists, and activists whose work explores these states. For the last fifty years, she has been a part of the Hog Farm, a well-known communal family based in Berkeley and in Laytonville, California.

Her “Women’s Visionary Council: Elders’ Oral History Project” initiative, supported by the Flourish Fellowship, aims to recognize and preserve the contributions of psychedelic elders in shaping contemporary psychedelic exploration. The project involves bringing together psychedelic elders and underground guides to record oral histories and document their experiences and practices.

Poulomi Saha

Flourish Fellow

Poulomi Saha is an associate professor of English and co-director of the Program in Critical Theory at UC Berkeley. They work at the intersections of Asian American studies, psychoanalytic critique, feminist and queer theory, and postcolonial studies. Currently, they are working on “Fascination,” a book about how our cultural obsession with cults reveals what we truly hunger for and how fundamentally cults have shaped spirituality, belonging, race, and the search for higher meaning in America. Their first book, An Empire of Touch: Women’s Political Labor & The Fabrication of East Bengal was awarded the Harry Levin Prize for outstanding first book by the American Comparative Literature Association and the Helen Tartar First Book Prize. Their work has been published in many academic and public venues, including differences, Interventions, and Signs.
This initiative, “Towards Re-enchantment: Mysticism, Psychedelics, Reimagining Critical Theory,” explores the intersections of mysticism, psychedelics, and critical theory from spiritual, psychoanalytic, and sociological perspectives, aiming to rejuvenate the emancipatory potential of critical theory through the lens of psychedelic experiences.

Liam McEvoy

Flourish Scholar

Liam McEvoy is an undergraduate student at UC Berkeley, majoring in Anthropology and minoring in “Middle Eastern Language & Culture” and “Race and Law.”

His project, “Unfurling the ‘Cup of Dreams’: A Blooming Investigation into the Egyptian Blue Lotus” is an inquiry into the psychoactive properties of the sacred Egyptian blue lotus (Nymphaea Caerulea, a water lily that appears extensively throughout the Egyptian Book of the Dead), as well as wellness products formulated with N. Caerulea and other species of water lily.

Darian Longmire

Flourish Fellow

Darian Longmire, an assistant professor of art practice at UC Berkeley, is a mixed-media artist whose work explores time, space, and techno culture. The Flourish Fellowship project Elastic Magazine, a publication of psychedelic art and literature, is a multidisciplinary and cross-functional collaboration between UC Berkeley and Harvard, with Hillary Brenhouse serving as editor-in-chief. This biannual print magazine will publish a diverse and expansive body of contemporary psychedelic art and writing while also paying tribute to an overlooked archive of psychedelic work by radically innovative artists, writers, and thinkers of color.

Patricia Kubala

Flourish Fellow

Patricia Kubala is a PhD candidate in socio-cultural anthropology at UC Berkeley. Her dissertation project, Psychedelic Reckonings, is a study of how concepts of ancestry, inheritance, and intergenerational transmission animate contemporary practices of working with psychedelics and plant medicines in the U.S. Her research considers not only the promise but also the dilemmas involved in the project of laboring for a psychedelic “otherwise” — for an ethics, therapeutics, and metaphysics adequate to reckoning with planetary ecological crisis and unresolved legacies of epistemic and material colonial and settler-colonial violence.

Her project, “Psychedelic Reckonings: Ancestry, Inheritance, and Intergenerational Transmission in Contemporary Psychedelic and Plant Medicine Practices in the United States,” will explore the increasing salience of multiple figures of ancestry, inheritance and transmission, across bodies, generations, humans and more-than-human-others, the living and the dead, to psychedelic culture in the United States. The fall 2024 symposium at UC Berkeley will cover topics including encounters with ancestors and the dead; the use of plant medicines by Indigenous, Black, and Asian communities in the U.S. to heal intergenerational trauma; and cultural appropriation within White psychedelic culture. Patricia will organize the event in collaboration with Juliana Willars, an Indigenous (Maya and Coahuiltecan descendant) medical anthropologist transitioning into psychotherapy with a focus on healing intergenerational trauma. She comes from a medicine lineage and has served the community through harm reduction education, crisis care at festivals, and agitating at numerous conferences about the disparity of access to psychedelics for Indigenous peoples and other marginalized populations and their lack of inclusion in policy-making.

Application Information

Flourish Fellows Spotlight

Research

BCSP brings together researchers from across disciplines, including neuroscience, molecular biology, psychology, education, social science, chemistry, and genetics, and experts in public policy, law, health economics, culture, and religion.

BCSP conducts basic neuroscience research, but does not offer clinical trials or treatment for mental health conditions. If you are seeking mental health care, please contact a licensed mental healthcare provider where you live. If you are having a medical emergency, please call “911” or go to the nearest emergency room. If you are having thoughts of suicide, please call or text “988” to reach the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline.

abstract image of a brain emerging from a silhouette of a face, against a green background

Research Overview

We are in the midst of an explosion in clinical research on the efficacy of psychedelic medicines and psychedelic-assisted therapy in the treatment of mental health disorders. These clinical studies and trials have produced encouraging results suggesting that psychedelic therapy can ameliorate the symptoms of many mental health disorders that are otherwise resistant to existing treatments.

To complement these ongoing clinical investigations, BCSP will leverage UC Berkeley’s strengths in basic neuroscience, psychology, and molecular biology to conduct studies to help elucidate the mechanistic bases of the actions of psychedelics and subjective psychedelic experiences, as well as their enduring effects.

This type of research in human subjects had been suppressed for fifty years for social and political reasons, but during that time there have been dramatic improvements in experimental techniques for probing the mind and brain, as well as associated conceptual advances in psychology and neuroscience.

Alongside clinical and other basic scientific research, big philosophical questions about epistemology, or ways of knowing, arise when experiencing or learning about psychedelics. In addition, practitioners, academics, and the media are asking questions about the political and societal consequences of psychedelics research and education, particularly for historically underrepresented communities.

BCSP will look to find answers to these questions through social science research that analyzes contextual aspects of psychedelics, education, and related fields. Through research fellowships, BCSP will increase the number and diversity of individuals trained to produce rigorous psychedelic science and knowledge.

BCSP Lab Research

A more complete mechanistic understanding of the way psychedelics affect brain function will be essential to better characterize and quantify the effects of psychedelics, to identify clinical protocols that lead to the best treatment outcomes, and to optimize these treatments for specific mental health disorders and individual patients.

BCSP researchers will conduct two types of laboratory studies with healthy human volunteers. The first type will employ neuroimaging and perceptual techniques to characterize the neural substrates of the psychedelic experience in real time. The second type of study focuses on the long-lasting transformative effects of the psychedelic experience on brain structure and function, cognition, emotion, and stress in both young and older adults.

UC Berkeley provides an ideal and unique environment for conducting neuroimaging studies with psychedelic drugs in human subjects. The Henry H. Wheeler Jr. Brain Imaging Center, located on campus, includes the NexGen 7-Tesla MRI scanner, the first ever high-field MRI scanner optimized specifically for human cerebral cortical imaging. This instrument is the result of a $20 million effort led by UC Berkeley and involving the NIH, Siemens, and a consortium of collaborating universities.

The NexGen 7-Tesla MRI scanner will provide unprecedented spatial resolution to reliably identify individual columns and layers within the cerebral cortex. BCSP researchers will employ this powerful tool to determine how psychedelic drugs affect perceptual priors, to quantify changes in brain representations during a psychedelic experience, and to characterize enduring changes in brain function following a psychedelic experience.

If you would like to learn more about potentially being a research participant in BCSP neuroscience studies of human subjects, please email BCSPresearchsubjects@berkeley.edu.

Prior BCSP Affiliated Research

Psychedelics and Neuroplasticity

In a study led by UC Berkeley neuroscientist Andrea Gomez, BCSP researchers aimed to understand the molecular and cellular basis for how psychedelics produce long-lasting changes in the brain. Insight from these studies will be harnessed into state-of-the-art CRISPR genome editing technologies to target the neural plasticity programs engaged by psychedelics. The molecular technologies produced by this effort aim to develop therapeutic applications for mental health conditions associated with defective neural plasticity, such as neurodegeneration.

Study on Psychedelics, Awe, and Enduring Personal and Social Change

In this study, led by Dacher Keltner, researchers will explore the neurophysiology and subjective experiences of awe and other self-transcendent states (compassion, gratitude, bliss) as they unfold during psychedelic experiences. They will document how these transformative shifts in sense of self give rise to enduring changes in well-being, physical health, and inclination to integrate into communities and engage in prosocial behavior.

The Ferriss – UC Berkeley Psychedelic Journalism Fellowships

Administered by the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, the Ferriss – UC Berkeley Psychedelic Journalism Fellowship offers ten $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.

the tip of a pencil against a two-tone green background

Learn More

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.

2026 Ferriss – UC Berkeley Psychedelic Journalism Fellows

Lisa Abend

Copenhagen, Denmark

Lisa Abend is a freelance journalist who writes on European culture, politics and science for The New York Times, TIME, Vanity Fair and Undark. She is also the author of The Sorcerer’s Apprentices: A Season in the Kitchen of Ferran Adrià’s elBulli. For the fellowship, she will report on a Europe-wide project investigating the effects of psychedelic treatment on the mental health of patients facing a range of terminal diagnoses.

Annie Avilés

U.S./Chile
Newsletter, Bluesky, X

Annie Avilés writes about rural lands and subcultures. She’s made longform stories for The Atlantic, Harper’s, VQR, Vice and others. Most recently, she was a Habitat for Humanity fellow in Chile, studying the role of traditional knowledge in disaster recovery. Annie started her career reporting for NPR from South America, covering land and natural resources. She later co-created Vice Audio, where she was part of the team that earned a Murrow for coverage of the fentanyl crisis. Today, in addition to reporting, she makes The Sticks, a newsletter that looks at the future of rural places. For the fellowship, Annie will focus on a movement in the Amazon to regulate ayahuasca.

Amanda Bailly

Saratoga Springs, New York
Instagram

Amanda Bailly is an independent journalist and award-winning documentary filmmaker who focuses on the people at the center of conflict and human rights crises around the world. Her work is intimate and character-driven, revealing the strength of ordinary people in the face of war, political violence and displacement. Over the past four years, she has reported extensively on the war in Ukraine, where she is currently in post-production on a feature-length documentary. For the fellowship, she will be following Ukrainian veterans turning to ketamine-assisted psychotherapy as a path to healing.

Gabriela Barzallo

New York, New York
Instagram, LinkedIn

Gabriela Barzallo is a bilingual journalist from Ecuador based in New York City, reporting across Latin America. She is pursuing a Master’s in International Affairs at The New School. Her work focuses on human rights, environmental justice, migration and inter-American politics, bridging journalism and international affairs to connect regional reporting with global policy conversations. She is a contributor to international outlets in English and Spanish, including The Guardian, El País and Al Jazeera. She has received fellowships from organizations including the International Women’s Media Foundation, The Uproot Project, the Solutions Journalism Network, One World Media and Johns Hopkins FPPN.

For this fellowship, she is reporting on the emergence of psychedelic therapy in Ecuador, examining how ancestral medicine and Western psychiatry are being integrated into new models of mental healthcare and what this may signal for Latin America.

Sophie Haigney

Brooklyn, New York
X

Sophie Haigney is a writer based in Brooklyn. Her journalism and essays have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, Harper’s, New York Magazine and many other publications. Her first book, Future Relics, a collection of essays about collecting, is forthcoming in 2027. For four years, she was the online editor at The Paris Review, where she is now an advisory editor, and she has taught writing at Yale. For the fellowship, she is reporting on growing tensions around psychedelic use in Alcoholics Anonymous and other recovery programs—and what this can tell us about how sobriety in America is changing.

Photo credit: Evan Murphy

Hussain Khan

Oakland, California
Instagram, LinkedIn

Hussain Khan is a journalist focused on community-centered reporting and narrative audio storytelling. His work covers housing, immigration and local policy, with a focus on how national issues shape everyday lives. He has reported and produced stories for KQED, KALW and the Investigative Reporting Program. In 2025, Khan earned a master’s degree from the UC Berkeley School of Journalism.

Khan began his journalism career in Canada, where he hosted and produced a narrative podcast on Muslim inmates and prison chaplains recognized at the Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival. At UC Berkeley, he reported on Gaza protest encampments and Palestinian students with family in Gaza. He later trained at the Transom Traveling Workshop and was selected for AIR New Voices 2024. His work on The California Report Magazine contributed to a SPJ NorCal Award 2025 for Best Arts & Culture Audio/Podcast.

For the fellowship, he is reporting on how racial inequities in clinical research, access and care are shaping the future of psychedelic-assisted therapy, and what that means for Black patients as the field expands.

Andrew Lawler

Asheville, North Carolina
LinkedIn, Facebook

Andrew Lawler is a journalist and author who has written about history, science, religion, cultural heritage and politics. His byline has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, National Geographic, Smithsonian and many other publications. He is a contributing writer for Science and contributing editor for Archaeology, as well as a National Geographic Explorer and a Pulitzer Center grantee. He is the recipient of several journalism awards and his work appeared in The Best of Science and Nature Writing. He also has written four books, including the prize-winning Under Jerusalem: The Buried History of the World’s Most Contested City. Andrew’s fellowship will focus on recent archaeological finds in the Andes Mountains which are shedding new light on ayahuasca, DMT and other mind-altering substance use in the evolution of pre-Incan societies.

Michelle Lhooq

Los Angeles, California
Instagram

Michelle Lhooq is an independent journalist and chronicler of the radical underground. She writes gonzo dispatches from the global frontiers of psychedelics and rave scenes in her newsletter, Rave New World—tracking how counterculture is evolving in an era of major paradigm shifts, rising authoritarianism and algorithmic hegemony. Previously, she was a features editor at VICE covering electronic music and a contributing editor reporting on psychedelic news and culture at DoubleBlind magazine. She is the author of Weed: Everything You Want to Know But Are Always Too Stoned to Ask, and her writing has also appeared in New York Magazine, The Guardian, Bloomberg, The Los Angeles Times and GQ. Lhooq’s work is interested in liminality, communal modes of resistance, new drug trends and the politics of pleasure; previous stories include a post-colonial history of Goa trance, the science of GMO weed, climate protestors at Burning Man and a post-cringe theory of psychedelic spirituality. For the fellowship, she is writing about how an ascendant network of conservative-leaning, yet counterculturally-coded disruptors in Austin, Texas are reframing psychedelics for a new generation.

Lakshmi Sarah

Berkeley, California
Bluesky, LinkedIn, Instagram

Lakshmi Sarah is an educator and journalist with a focus on creative storytelling. She has worked with newspapers, radio and magazines from Ahmedabad, India to Los Angeles, California. With a passion for experimental innovative projects, she has developed curriculum for journalists in immersive storytelling, and has taught at the UC Berkeley School of Journalism and Berkeley’s Advanced Media Institute. Her work has appeared in AJ+, KQED, Die Zeit Online and The New York Times. She is a co-author of Crafting Stories for Virtual Reality (Routledge, 2018) and is currently a lecturer in the UC Berkeley Geography Department. Sarah received a master’s degree from the UC Berkeley School of Journalism in 2016. She’ll be pursuing a story on medical oversight and ethical use amidst a growing effort to understand the power of psychedelic medicine when mixed with modern psychology.

Jyoti Thakur

New Delhi, India
LinkedIn

Jyoti Thakur is an independent journalist based in New Delhi, India, whose work focuses on science, tech, health, climate, and social justice. She has contributed to over a dozen media outlets, including Scientific American, NPR, BBC, Nikkei Asia, The Guardian, Deutsche Welle, and Al Jazeera among others. She has received 13th Laadli Media Awards from Population First and UNFPA in recognition of her gender-sensitive reporting for her work on how climate change is worsening water woes for women in India. For this fellowship, Jyoti is reporting on the growing use of AI chatbots as trip sitters during psychedelic experiences and its implications for mental health in India.

2025 Ferriss – UC Berkeley Psychedelic Journalism Fellows

Izzy Bloom

Berkeley, California
X, LinkedIn

Izzy Bloom is a reporter at KQED public radio and the producer of Political Breakdown. Izzy has reported longform audio stories about the Indigenous land back movement for The California Report Magazine and heritage language loss for NPR’s Code Switch, for which she was a finalist at the Third Coast International Audio Festival. For the fellowship, Izzy is reporting on how psychedelics can treat mental health conditions.

Saugat Bolakhe

New York, New York
X, LinkedIn

Saugat Bolakhe is a science writer based in New York City. He writes around the themes of everything in life sciences, biotech, and environment. He has written for The Atlantic, Wired, Scientific American, Nature, Science News, The Xylom, Quanta Magazine, New Scientist, EOS, Knowable Magazine, and other publications. In 2024, he was also recognized with the Science Journalism award from the Nepal Academy of Science and Technology. He has a BS in Zoology from Tribhuvan University, Nepal and an MA in science journalism from Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY. He also manages an international community of early career science journalists at The Open Notebook, a journalism non-profit dedicated to help health and science journalists improve their craft. For the fellowship, he is reporting about the mystic and cult following surrounding mad honey, which is harvested from the Himalayan cliffs of Nepal.

Christina Cala

Washington, D.C.
X, www.christinacala.com

Christina Cala is the senior producer of Code Switch, NPR’s show about race and identity. She’s fascinated by stories about Latinx communities, migration, identity and language. Her work has also been featured on All Things Considered, TED Radio Hour, Life Kit, It’s Been a Minute, and Popular Science. Her 2019 immigration reporting on President Trump’s asylum crackdown won a Murrow Award. Her reporting on the fight around Lakota language revitalization won a Gracie Award. For the fellowship, Christina is reporting on the rising popularity of Ayahuasca in Colombia, and whether that is a threat or a boon for the Inga and Kamentsá tribes who offer the plant medicine.

CD Goette-Luciak

New York, New York
X, Instagram, LinkedIn

CD Goette-Luciak is an investigative journalist who’s written for The Washington Post, the Miami Herald, The Guardian, Vox and NPR. He is an Investigative Reporting Fellow for the Toni Stabile Center for Investigative Journalism at Columbia University and received an Overseas Press Club Foundation Fellowship to report for the Los Angeles Times from Mexico. Fluent in English, Spanish, and German, he has covered stories in every country in the Americas, reporting on democracy, migration, climate change, human rights, organized crime and corruption. He previously worked as a reporter for the Latin America Advisor and Radio La Ciudadana, and was the Senior Latin America and Caribbean Analyst for the IDB Group in Washington, D.C. He received a Master’s in Public Policy and a B.A. in Political and Social Thought from the University of Virginia, where he was a Jefferson Scholar.

Leila Goldstein

Phnom Penh, Cambodia
X, LinkedIn, www.leilagoldstein.com

Leila Goldstein is a journalist covering stories across Southeast Asia. Her work has been published by NPR, The Guardian, BBC, Marketplace and The World. She has covered the return of looted Cambodian relics, a landmark environmental rights lawsuit in Thailand, and the trafficking of Indonesian citizens in the illegal organ trade. As a 2024 Longworth Media Fellow, she covered the impact of U.S. solar tariffs on the global solar manufacturing supply chain, from Vietnam to Ohio. For the fellowship, she is reporting on the expansion of ketamine production and trafficking in Southeast Asia.

Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi

Brooklyn, New York
Instagram

Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi is a host and reporter for NPR’s Planet Money, telling stories that creatively explain the workings of the global economy. His work often explores the financial and cultural architecture of consumerism, from corporate returns policies to subscription services to new forms of consumer credit. He’s also drawn to tales of unintended consequences, like the time a well-intentioned chemistry professor unwittingly helped unleash a global market for synthetic drugs, what happened when the U.S. Patent Office started granting patents on human genes, or how the internet cookie became a tool of mass surveillance. And he’s interested in the places where the market economy meets the natural world, from the story of how manatees got addicted to fossil fuels, to the fight over one of the most valuable lobster fisheries in the world, to the tale of the orphaned baby squirrel that became a social media celebrity, then a political martyr, and finally inspired a cryptocurrency worth billions of dollars. For the fellowship, he’s reporting on the world of psychedelic churches.

Manisha Krishnan

Brooklyn, New York
Bluesky, X

Manisha Krishnan is an Emmy award-winning journalist and senior culture editor at WIRED. A former senior reporter for VICE News, she has been publishing groundbreaking drug reporting for a decade. She embedded with a fentanyl dealer to investigate deadly new synthetic drugs in the VICE News Tonight documentary Beyond Fentanyl, which won a 2023 Emmy for outstanding health coverage. Her work on a highly-addictive legal supplement known as “gas station heroin” won a New York Press Club award and has been used to change policy.

Manisha has also published documentaries and feature stories on the rise of psychedelic churches in the U.S., a Black community using magic mushrooms to heal from racism, and Silicon Valley workers embracing kambo—a purge-inducing frog poison used by Amazonian tribes. Her fellowship will focus on a burgeoning frontier of psychedelic therapy: using psychedelics to treat drug addiction. Manisha is from Vancouver, Canada and now lives in New York City.

Andrew Logan

Austin, Texas
Bluesky, Instagram

Andrew Logan is a screenwriter, producer, and journalist based in Austin. As a screenwriter, he co-wrote Chappaquiddick, a political thriller that chronicles the true story of the infamous Ted Kennedy scandal, starring Jason Clarke, Kate Mara, Ed Helms, and Bruce Dern. The script was listed on the prestigious Black List in 2015, and in 2017, Andrew was named on Variety’s 10 Screenwriters to Watch list. Additionally, Andrew has produced several independent films that have premiered at the Sundance Film Festival and South by Southwest. His journalism has appeared in Texas Monthly,the Texas Observer, and other outlets.

Adreanna Rodriguez

Oakland, California
LinkedIn, Instagram, X

Adreanna Rodriguez is an independent journalist and producer based in Oakland, California. As a Hunkpapa Lakota/Chicana woman, her research, podcasts, and documentaries focus on issues of social and climate justice for Indigenous communities, as well as femme stories. While employed at VICE, she was an Ida B. Wells fellow through Type Investigations, where her feature audio story “Roe Was Never Enough,” was a finalist for a Third Coast International Audio award and the recipient of a Gracie Award. In 2024 she completed a yearlong investigation with Audible, among several other independently produced audio stories for clients like PRX and LWC Studios. Adreanna holds a M.A. in Visual Anthropology from San Francisco State University and a Graduate Certificate in Documentary Studies from the Maine College of Art. For the fellowship, Adreanna will be covering the use of sacramental peyote within Native American communities.

Sammie Seamon

New York, New York
X, Instagram

Sammie Seamon is a freelance journalist and MFA candidate in Literary Reportage at the NYU Arthur J. Carter Journalism Institute. Currently based in New York City by way of Austin, Texas, she often reports in Spanish-speaking communities and contributes bilingually to Molino Informativo in the Bronx, NY. For the fellowship, she is writing for the Guardian US on the use of psychedelics for the treatment of cluster headache, an incredibly painful neurological disorder that lacks a pharmaceutical solution, and how patients are still advocating for and contributing to psychedelic research.

2024 Ferriss – UC Berkeley Psychedelic Journalism Fellows

Robin Berghaus

Austin, Texas
@robinberghaus.bsky.social, @RobinPBerghaus

Robin writes feature stories and produces documentaries that engage the public about advances in science, health, medicine, and technology. Her projects have shown at international film festivals, on PBS, and as part of Alfred P. Sloan Foundation’s Science on Screen. Robin serves as a speaker and production consultant for organizations and universities, and as a film envoy for American Film Showcase. She holds a BS in biology from Boston College, and an MFA in film production from Boston University. For the fellowship, Robin is working on an audio project on psychedelics in Texas.

Mattha Busby

Vancouver, Canada
@matthabusby, @matthamundo

Mattha Busby is a freelance journalist. He worked as a news reporter at the Guardian in London from 2017 to 2021 after winning an award for a series on the gambling industry before moving to Mexico. There, he interviewed Maria Sabina’s family on her legacy, visited the town that banned Coca-Cola and documented 4/20 in Oaxaca City just after authorities approved public cannabis consumption. He has also written for TIME, the Times of London, the Observer, the Intercept, VICE, DoubleBlind and Men’s Health. In 2022, Thames & Hudson published a slim volume authored by Mattha titled, ‘Should All Drugs Be Legalized?’. His podcast Uncharted Territory unpacks the pro-psychedelics culture shift. For the fellowship, Mattha is working on a story about war trauma and psychedelics.

Rachel Carlson

Los Angeles, California
@_rachelcarlson

Rachel Carlson is a writer and producer at NPR, where she works on the science podcast, Short Wave. A recent graduate in cognitive neuroscience and literature at Brown University, she studied the intersections between the human brain and storytelling. She’s fascinated by the ways our neurons are shaped by language, writing and experience. During college, she also did research on the science behind ketamine therapy, including barriers to access and patient experiences receiving the drug for treatment-resistant depression. For the fellowship, Rachel is reporting on the science and philosophy of “tripless” psychedelic-like drugs.

Anne Marshall-Chalmers

Albany, California
@marshall_anne

Anne Marshall-Chalmers is an investigative reporter with The War Horse focusing on the health of veterans, active-duty service members, and their families. Prior to The War Horse, her work appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Atlas Obscura, Mother Jones, Inside Climate News, NPR, Civil Eats, Cal Matters, and other publications. For the fellowship, Marshall-Chalmers will investigate the unusual and underground ways veterans have accessed psychedelic therapy to help with lingering trauma.

Meghan McCarron

Culver City, California
Instagram @meghanmccarron

Meghan McCarron is an award-winning freelance journalist focused on the intersection of food and culture, which has led her to cover everything from the history of Tex-Mex to the 2020 Presidential race to the rise of luxury psilocybin chocolates. She’s written for The New York Times, Bon Appetit, the Los Angeles Times, and spent nearly a decade on staff at Eater as an editor and correspondent. For the fellowship, she will explore how legalization may change how psilocybin mushrooms are bred, and the challenges small cultivators face with the rise of Big Mushroom.

Sarah Mirk

Portland, Oregon
@mirkdrop

Sarah “Shay” Mirk (they/she) is a graphic journalist, editor, and teacher. For six years, Shay was a contributing editor at comics publication The Nib, where projects she worked on won both Eisner and Ignatz awards. They are the author of several books, including Guantanamo Voices, an illustrated oral history of Guantanamo Bay prison, which Kirkus called “extraordinary… an eye-opening, damning indictment of one of America’s worst trespasses.” They are a zine-maker and cartoonist whose comics have been featured in The New Yorker, Bitch, and NPR. Her book on the craft of making nonfiction comics, Making Nonfiction Comics: A Field Guide to Graphic Journalism (co-written with Eleri Harris), will debut from Abrams ComicsArts in 2025. For 2023-2024, Shay is the Applied Cartooning Fellow at the Center for Cartoon Studies in Vermont. She is white, nonbinary, and queer. For their fellowship, Shay is working on a series of cartoons about people’s psychedelic experiences.

Cecilia Nowell

Albuquerque, New Mexico
@cecilianowell

Cecilia Nowell is a freelance reporter focused on health equity stories in the Americas. Her work has been published by The Guardian, KFF Health News, The Nation, New York Magazine, Cosmopolitan, and others. In 2022, she was recognized as a Livingston Award finalist in national reporting for her coverage of a California mother serving an 11-year prison sentence after a stillbirth, and in 2023, she reported on reproductive and gender-affirming healthcare deserts as a grantee with the Inaugural Journalism & Women Symposium Health Journalism Fellowship. For the fellowship, she will report on attempts to treat opioid use disorder with psychedelics.

Erin Schumaker

Brooklyn, New York
@erinlschumaker

Erin Schumaker reports on the future of health care for POLITICO. Previously she was Business Insider’s science editor, where her team covered space, climate, extreme weather and discoveries. Prior to that, she reported on the Covid-19 pandemic for ABC News, including the trends driving infections and the struggles of safety-net hospitals. She was also a reporter at HuffPost, where she covered the opioid crisis and gun violence as public health challenges. For her fellowship, Erin will be writing about the Washington decision-makers hashing out the future of psychedelics policy.

Haleema Shah

Baltimore, Maryland
@haleemakshah

Haleema Shah is a journalist with a decade of experience making podcasts and radio shows. She is currently a senior producer and reporter for Vox’s news program Today, Explained. As a lover of history, her work draws heavily on archival footage and oral history to explore how the past informs our present. For the fellowship, she is reporting on the early use of psychedelics in psychotherapy before they were restricted as dangerous drugs, and how those discoveries might be applied in today’s radically different mental health landscape.

Seema Yasmin

Las Vegas, Nevada
@DoctorYasmin

Seema Yasmin is an Emmy award-winning journalist, author and poet whose writing appears in the New York Times, Rolling Stone, WIRED and Scientific American. She trained in medicine at the University of Cambridge and in journalism at the University of Toronto. She is the author of eight books including a poetry collection, children’s picture book and a YA novel. For the fellowship, Seema is exploring psychedelic chaplaincy and the shifting permissibility of psychedelics in medicine, religion and law.

2023 Ferriss – UC Berkeley Psychedelic Journalism Fellows

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 Psychedelic Journalism Fellows

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.”

Chris Walker

Denver, Colorado
@bikejou r nalist

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.

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

Tristan Ahtone

@Tahtone

Tristan Ahtone is a member of the Kiowa Tribe and is 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. Ahtone’s stories have won multiple honors, including investigative awards from the Gannett Foundation and Public Radio News Directors Incorporated. He additionally 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, Ahtone is a 2017 Nieman Fellow and a director of the Muckrock Foundation.

Alan Burdick

@alanburdick

Alan Burdick 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 Awards 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 appeared there and 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 with his family outside of New York.

Connie Walker

Connie Walker is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist and host of the acclaimed podcasts “Stolen” and “Missing & Murdered”. Her work has exposed the crisis of violence in Indigenous communities and the devastating impacts of intergenerational trauma stemming from Indian Residential Schools. In 2023, “Stolen: Surviving St. Michael’s” was awarded a Pulitzer Prize, a Peabody Award, an Alfred I. duPont-Columbia Award and an Edward R. Murrow Award. Prior to joining Gimlet Media, Walker spent nearly two decades as a reporter and host for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. Walker is a member of the Okanese First Nation in Saskatchewan.

Our Values

The BCSP is committed to embedding our values and principles in all that we do: in the questions we ask, the way we collaborate, the stories we cover, and how we conduct scientific research. Living into our values looks different in each of our pillars: basic science, journalism, culture and community, and applied research and policy. This is an iterative, long-term process, and the BCSP is fully committed to listening and learning.

Equity and reciprocity. Equity and reciprocity require changing systems, practices, processes, and resource redistribution; recognizing and addressing oppression and related systemic barriers to opportunity; and ensuring that we provide spaces in which people experience a sense of belonging to a community within the field of psychedelics. We recognize that psychedelics-related work in academia often ignores or appropriates millennia of Indigenous practices with these plants, fungi, and compounds. We aim to ensure that our collaborations with individuals, communities, and organizations are rooted in mutual benefit, respect, and shared growth.
Integrity and transparency. As a trusted source for the psychedelic ecosystem and those who are curious about it, we work to ensure that everyone has access to the BCSP’s knowledge. We believe that transparency builds trust. We are transparent about what we do, why we do it, what we learn, what we know and do not know, the impact we have, and when we cannot be transparent (such as with some aspects of clinical trials).
The development of rigorous research. We strive for excellence in our research and have a multi-faceted view of evidence, inclusive of a range of methodologies to gather and analyze both qualitative and quantitative data and information.
Responsibility as stewards of public resources. We are keenly aware of the need to lead ethically in this complex landscape with great care and awareness of our impact. We hold ourselves accountable to the highest ethical standards, ensure that our actions align with our mission and values, and remain open to feedback and continuous improvement.
Curiosity. Curiosity opens the door to exploring not just scientific knowledge but also diverse perspectives and multiple ways of knowing, creating space for the integration of insights from both traditional wisdom and modern science. Our curiosity helps us challenge assumptions and change course based on what we learn.
Community engagement and collaboration. We are stronger when we work in community—when more than one mind, set of beliefs, or disciplines addresses a complex topic. We believe that complicated societal issues are best addressed by collaborative efforts that include multiple perspectives. We foster environments where growth, reflection, and learning can occur.
Team capacity building and well-being. We believe that investing in our team, distributing power, engaging with respect and care, and supporting inclusion and belonging within the BCSP leads to greater job satisfaction and a deeper sense of purpose. By cultivating an environment where individuals feel valued and supported, we align more deeply with our mission and enhance our impact.