Psychedelic Research as a Career Path: A Roundtable Discussion with Early Career Researchers in the Field

After decades of prohibition, psychedelic drugs and their potential therapeutic applications have recaptured the attention of scientists, regulators, and the general public.¹ Fueled by positive findings from clinical trials and swift monetary investment from venture capitalists, psychedelics are now a multibillion dollar industry at the center of the scientific stage.² Despite this overwhelming enthusiasm, it is still unclear to many exactly how to get involved in the burgeoning field of “psychedelic science” as well as specifically which skills should be developed to become a psychedelic researcher.

Although a blog post from 2010 put forth some early suggestions,³ the landscape of the field has changed dramatically in the years since, and an updated perspective is needed. The present roundtable discussion was convened to address this gap by having two early career researchers in the psychedelic space, Drs. Jacob Aday and Natasha Mason, moderate a discussion with current graduate students and psychiatry residents researching psychedelics, Bo Wood, Hannah Kramer, Cynthia Ortiz, Frances Vest, Caroline Sagrera, and C.J. Healy, about their experiences entering the field. It is our hope that this conversation can serve as a useful blueprint and guide for prospective students interested in becoming psychedelic researchers (Table 1).

Table 1.

Key Questions and Responses from the Panel

Question	Summary	Advice
What is your research field?	There is not a field of psychedelic studies as such, so the academic study of psychedelics takes place by way of a wide range of established disciplines, including chemistry, pharmacology, psychology, neuroscience, anthropology, and philosophy. In this panel, the perspectives are taken from those in the fields of psychopharmacology, clinical and experimental psychology, psychiatry, and neuroscience. Most panel members are working in the United States.	Students from a wide variety of backgrounds can engage in psychedelic research, even if they do not “study psychedelics” in their undergraduate or graduate programs. What should determine their choice of study should be what they want to investigate in, or bring to, the psychedelic research space.
What issues did you face when getting into the psychedelic research field?	Here, two perspectives were prominent: For some, when entering the field, they felt there was no one to talk to about their interest—these substances carried and continue to bear a stigma, being perceived as dangerous, or damaging to one's career. Consequently, there was no clear path to enter the field of “psychedelic research.” Even when able to, due to the emerging nature of the field, obtaining research approval, securing funding, and comprehending where psychedelics fit into the present health care framework pose considerable challenges. On the other side of the spectrum, there is a recent boom of interest in these substances (e.g., “hype5”). This comes with other problems, such as a lot of competition for (still limited) positions, and false expectations (and subsequent suspicions) for what psychedelic treatments may actually be able to achieve.	Seek out mentors and researchers in the field who are knowledgeable about psychedelic research. By establishing a network, you open avenues to receive guidance, insights, and a space to candidly discuss your interests. This can help inform your own research path. Importantly, when reaching out, be clear what you want to investigate in the context of psychedelic substances. Here, there is a difference between stating “I want to do psychedelic research” versus “I want to investigate X about psychedelic substances because of X.” This context is also important to consider when applying for graduate programs, where you cannot study “psychedelic science,” but can study an overlapping, relevant program. Although there is growing interest and enthusiasm for the therapeutic potential of psychedelic substances, as a scientist, it is important to adopt a balanced perspective grounded in empirical evidence. This entails approaching the field with pragmatic expectations, and a commitment to understanding and investigating the full spectrum of psychedelic experiences.
What specific skills were useful to become a psychedelic researcher?	Developing basic research skills, dependent on your topic, is very advantageous. This can include general laboratory experience as well as specific techniques. Project management, academic writing, and programming are extremely important across research disciplines. Patience and resilience when trying to get approval to run research projects, when applying for funding, or when experiments do not work out, are essential. Psychedelic-specific research skills do exist. For example, in human/clinical research, empathic skills are important when working with people in a vulnerable (i.e., intoxicated) state. Open-mindedness, curiosity, and respect to the fact that people have a diverse range of (positive and negative) experiences, which can feel very true for them, are also important. As a scientist, these experiences may be difficult to measure and quantify, as they can be ineffable for a human volunteer, or unable to be measured in a preclinical model. Creativity and openness can also be important skills when designing new studies. For example, when unable to perform experimental studies, literature reviews and observational work can help you get started in the psychedelic research space.	Given there is not a field of “psychedelic studies,” students can benefit from developing theoretical and methodological proficiency in a particular discipline, which they can then apply to the study of psychedelics when they have the chance to specialize. Thus, for many aspects, the keyword is “researcher,” and developing basic research skills are very useful. That said, there are some psychedelic-specific considerations, particularly when working with human volunteers who are under the influence. When considering a career as a psychedelic researcher, whether one has, or can develop, this skill set should be considered. Furthermore, experimental trials with psychedelics are sometimes difficult to run. Here, creativity and openness to different types of study designs can help you get started in the field. Reaching out and collaborating with people already in the psychedelic space, for example, literature reviews or observational studies, can be very fruitful.
Considering our respective fields, what are the important considerations for the psychedelic research space in the future?	A central future consideration is achieving affordable, accessible, and safe psychedelic medicine. This includes considering how to reduce costs (e.g., with group therapy and insurance coverage), what clinical psychedelic training and psychedelic clinics look like, and contemplating the international implementation of these approaches. Another central future path is elucidating mechanisms of (therapeutic) psychedelic action. Is the psychological psychedelic experience necessary, what role do cognition, inflammation, and neuroplasticity play in the persisting effects of these drugs? Seeking both forward and backward translation is essential.	The future of accessible psychedelic medicine involves considerations from multiple different perspectives. In addition, understanding the mechanisms of the therapeutic effects of psychedelics will help us to further maximize their efficacy, while reducing risks. Taken together, the psychedelic research field needs people with diverse (educational) backgrounds to collectively shape the landscape.
How can someone get involved in the psychedelic research field as an/a (under)graduate student or young researcher?	Volunteering is a great way to get involved, and there are many options. Volunteering as an intern, research, or clinical assistant—even if it is not directly in the psychedelic field—allows you to gain important research skills in the type of environment you want to work in, in the future. Volunteering in relevant organizations, such as harm reduction initiatives (e.g., Fireside Project) helps you build a network, is good for your resume, shows people you are serious about this type of work, and can also provide you useful experiences, such as how to talk to the general population about drugs. Volunteering at and attending conferences allows you to meet researchers and build your network. Simultaneously, attending conferences acquaints you with the current state of research.	In universities, there are many opportunities to gain experiences that will help you on your way to a career in psychedelic research. Volunteering in research or clinical groups, relevant organizations, or at conferences can provide a wealth of benefits. Do not be afraid to try and connect with psychedelic researchers. Conferences are a great way to meet them in person, and that personal connection can go a long way. Here, making sure you are familiar with the literature also allows you to advocate for yourself when these opportunities arise. Importantly, be wary of what you pay for. As the interest in psychedelics increases, so does the amount of people trying to leverage money out of others. Any information that a seminar, lecture series, or specialized course is providing, often can be found free online, in academic articles, and talks (e.g., YouTube). Remember—it is not a sprint, it is a marathon, and it is going to take a while to get to where you want to go. With patience and perseverance, you can get there!

Dr. Aday: Thank you all for being here. This is the trainee editorial board for Psychedelic Medicine. Today, we are going to talk about how to become a psychedelic researcher and considerations for getting involved in the field as a student. We will start with introductions and have everyone go around and introduce themselves: Share what your field is, how did you get here, and what was your specific motivation for pursuing psychedelic science?

Dr. Mason: I can begin. So my name is Natasha Mason. I am an assistant professor in the department of neuropsychology and psychopharmacology at Maastricht University in the Netherlands, and I conduct human drug trials with psychedelic substances. I am interested in mechanisms of action of these drugs—how do they work? How do they change brain function, which then induces changes in emotions, cognition, and behavior? And here I am particularly interested in potential therapeutic mechanisms. So what are these drugs doing—what are they changing—that is making people feel better?

How did I get here? Yeah, it is a long, winding road, but I have always been interested in how you can take an external drug, ingest it, and it can make you feel better. So when you say this interest to your high school counselor in a small Midwest town, they tell you to go study pharmacy. So I went to university as a pre-pharmacy student, started taking pre-pharmacy classes, and then started working in pharmacies and getting experience with people who are coming to those pharmacies, getting their prescriptions.

Here, I kind of was hit with a harsh reality that a lot of the drugs we were giving people were not making them feel better and were not helping. There were lots of complaints about inefficient drugs, particularly antidepressants. During this time I heard a lot of this, and a lot of complaints of side effects from, for example, opioids for pain. I was disillusioned a bit from that.

At the same time, I was doing research in neuropsychopharmacology laboratories and in psychiatry laboratories, and realizing that through research you can investigate novel treatments. I was a bachelor student at this time, so this thought was very revolutionary to me. At the same time, I was reading the literature on treatments for mental health disorders, and came across this article by Vollenweider and Kometer, 2010, about how a single ingestion of a psychedelic drug can cure people of their depression.

Of course, we know now it is more nuanced than that, but this was really revolutionary to me because none of my pharmacy classes were saying anything like this. They were talking about chronic administration of antidepressant drugs, as a kind of a Band-Aid, placed over the symptoms. This was not actually treating the disorder.

So the combination of really liking research and also reading about psychedelic drugs made me switch my topic. I changed to a bachelor of science in psychology and became convinced that I am going to be a psychedelic researcher—I am going to figure out how these drugs work. This was like 2012-ish, so there was not a ton of opportunities at the time, but the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS) website did have a list of researchers there. I wanted to pursue laboratories that were doing human trials, administering the drugs, looking at mechanisms.

Here, I found Maastricht University, because they have a long history in 3,4-Methylenedioxymethamphetamine (MDMA) research, looking at mechanisms of MDMA. So I came to them and I begged them to let me work with them. They told me to do a master's. I did a master's and then an internship, a PhD, a postdoc. I am now an assistant professor in the department of neuropsychology and psychopharmacology.

Dr. Aday: My name is Jake Aday. I am a research investigator at University of Michigan in the Chronic Pain and Fatigue Research Center as well as the Michigan Psychedelic Center. For me, I have always had an interest in psychedelics but did not really see it as a viable career path early on. I was majoring in psychology, was really interested in the mind and how people can augment the contents of the mind, and psychedelics obviously fall under that category. This is around like 2012-ish or so while I was an undergrad.

I was really interested in some of the preliminary findings that were coming out of Hopkins showing that reliably, they could trigger mystical-type experiences and reliably, they could have people have one of the most meaningful experiences of their lives, which as a psychology student how would you not be interested in that? It is pretty mind-blowing.

So I am super interested and curious. But like I said, it is very fringe at the time still; there were only a couple of universities doing psychedelic research in the early 2010s. At least in the United States, it was just basically Hopkins, NYU, and UCLA. And I was at a smaller regional school that did not have anything like psychedelic clinical trials going on at the time. But, I was interested in psychology more broadly and interested in research. So I was developing skills volunteering in research laboratories; specifically, studying anxiolytic drugs in rat models.

Then, I moved on to a human cognitive neuroscience laboratory for my master's degree to study anxiety and emotion more broadly. After I finished my master's degree in 2017, I went on to a PhD program at Central Michigan University. There, things worked out very serendipitously. I initially went there to work on attention and cognitive neuroscience research pretty broadly. But the first semester of the program, I took a history of psychology class that was taught by my advisor.

And in that class, he let me write an article on the history of lysergic acid diethylamide. I was super passionate about that. It was my first chance to make psychedelics a part of my scholarly work. So I worked really hard on that article. We ended up publishing it and from that, he saw that we could do publishable scholarly work in this area, so he gave me the freedom to start writing more theory and review-type articles that we could do without collecting primary data and we did that for a couple years.

Then, it came time to do the dissertation and, at that point, I had written a few psychedelic articles and had made some connections in the field. So I collaborated with an ayahuasca retreat to do a naturalistic study. After that, it seemed like the next natural step was to get involved in clinical trials. So that is why I came to University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), to do that with Josh Woolley.

And so like I said, it is something I have always been interested in, but there really were not too many options to get involved early on. It seems like nowadays there is a lot more opportunities, but also a lot more competition. So it is harder to stand out. So I think there are advantages and disadvantages to everybody who is reading this and to everybody who is involved in the panel right now who are just getting their career started.

Kramer: I can jump in, my name is Hannah Kramer. I am a PhD student at Louisiana State University Health Sciences Center in New Orleans, working under Dr. Charles Nichols. I got into this field, because I am interested in biology. In my undergrad, I started out as a pre-veterinary science major. I had always dreamed of going to vet school and actually majored in pre-veterinary science at an agricultural high school. It was a special hands-on experience in high school, and then I continued on that track into college.

About halfway through my undergrad, I started to lose interest and a bit of passion for it. I started getting fascinated with the brain and came across psychedelics and was so intrigued by the information that was out there about how MDMA could cure posttraumatic stress disorder. I started reading more about the MAPS clinical trials, and I was blown away that these compounds were truly healing people when the current medications out there were not doing that.

So that really jump-started my interest in pursuing this career as a scientist and just trying to understand these medicines on a mechanistic level, understand what else is out there and how we could help and heal people. Right now, my project in the laboratory is to understand how psilocybin works as a long-lasting antidepressant using preclinical models of depression. My interests are growing more toward how we use these compounds in people, so I hope to eventually work on the clinical side of things.

Dr. Mason: Wonderful. And what mechanisms are you focusing on?

Kramer: We are looking at gene and protein expression particularly in the medial prefrontal cortex, trying to understand what is elevated with a heavy focus on the glutamate system.

Ortiz: I can go next. My name is Cynthia Ortiz. I am a clinical psychology doctoral student here at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. I work under Dr. Peter Hendricks and have been for the past four, going on five years. So I'm about to start my fifth year of my clinical psychology program, and I got into this world of psychedelics through Peter and through his pilot trial on psilocybin for cocaine use. He was able to, because the trial was still ongoing when I got here, allow me to sit in on a lot of the psilocybin sessions or co-lead the therapy sessions. For me, as someone who wants to be a clinical psychologist, I am interested in addiction and substance use overall.

Psychedelics for me are a good option to study other mechanisms or other things that can help those struggling with addiction. So I am not necessarily just a psychedelic researcher, more like an addiction researcher who is interested in this kind of new wave of therapeutic use in psychedelics. So that is my motivation in finding all of these new ways that we can help people, even just maybe a little bit more. Maybe it is not 100% effective for every single person to stop using a number of substances, but if we can help, maybe just a little bit more, that would be a great solution to a lot of these problems of addiction.

I recently, within the past year or so, defended my master's thesis, which was less on psychedelics overall. It was on adolescent cannavaping use and anhedonia. But my dissertation, which I just proposed and will be starting data collection soon, is on 5-Methoxy-N,N-dimethyltryptamine (DMT) and DMT vaping versus psilocybin users and how those qualitative reports differ. So it will be a little bit more exploratory, but excited to start that and provide a little bit more information about these different substances that are becoming more popular.

Aside from that project, our laboratory is about to have a whole bunch of other psychedelic-related studies, including 5-MeO-DMT for treatment-resistant depression. We have got psilocybin for smoking cessation. So we are going to have a lot more going on. It has just been interesting to be a part of this rise in popularity. When I first came into the program and started working with Peter, it seemed a little bit more of a quiet field, and that was just four years ago. So in the past four years, I have really seen this explode.

Vest: I can go next. So I am Frances Vest. I am now going into my fourth year of my PhD at LSU Health Shreveport in the department of pharmacology, toxicology, and neuroscience. I have been working in Dr. Murnane's laboratory since I was a junior in college. The transition into interning in his laboratory really was an awakening for me because I went to college to be an art therapist. Growing up, I really was passionate about healing people, always asking why and how about everything, while also being passionate about art. Therefore, I believed art therapy to be a way of combining two of my passions. I wanted to help so much with the mental health crisis that I saw affecting so many people that I loved.

But then as my friends in biology classes were talking, I realized that I really missed that mechanistic side of things. Eventually I made the decision to change my major from psychology and studio art to biopsychology, which allowed me to combine my love for biology and psychology. Then, when I started interning in Dr. Murnane's behavioral pharmacology laboratory, I was like, well, this is just perfect.

While I began to learn about psychedelics from Dr. Murnane, I was also taking a drugs, brain, and behavior course and learning more about psychedelics there. It was this kind of epiphany that just became my driving passion and what I wanted to do. Reading more and seeing psilocybin get breakthrough status for treatment-resistant depression really solidified my interest to pursue a career in this field.

A few years later, we came all the way from Georgia to LSU Health Shreveport, where I started being able to do human research and not just preclinical research. Thus far, I have been studying methamphetamine addiction, and characterizing the neurobiological and cognitive changes that occur as well as different vulnerabilities that lead to addiction. This is acting as a backbone for the angle that I am trying to study psychedelics through—how they can treat methamphetamine addiction. I am happy to say that we are currently working on getting a clinical trial started.

We have got the institutional review board protocol written and approved, and we are working through all of the regulatory stuff, which has been a really insightful training experience. As frustrating as it can be to work through the regulatory side of things, I am really thankful to have that experience now in the comfort of my laboratory. Not only that but also I have the opportunity to really change the lives of the population we are studying. I did preclinical research as an undergraduate, but now doing clinical research and really talking to the people who we are trying to help, it just makes me so much more passionate and excited to get this done because they are so eager and desperate for help.

Many of the people that I have talked to, they have been through treatment so many times and just have had their lives wrecked by the substance that they want so badly to be rid of. They want so badly to have better for themselves, their children, and their families. That is where psychedelics bring so much hope, a potential solution that is not a long list of medications treating the symptoms associated with addiction, such as depression and anxiety. I am just so grateful to be able to be a part of this, and to see this evolution happening is really exciting.

Wood: My name is Bo Wood, I am a fourth year graduate student in Dr. Kevin Murnane's laboratory at LSU Health Shreveport as well, where our field of study is behavioral pharmacology with a special interest in substance use disorders. Initially, I would say, as a kid, I always wanted to do research, but I never really knew that is what it was called. As I got older, I played a lot of soccer and saw many of my friends get injured, which kind of led to my initial career path of wanting to be some sort of physician who fixed knees.

In an attempt to stand out for my medical school applications, I did not want to do just a biology major. Instead, I did a biopsychology major and through that process discovered my love for the brain. Unfortunately, during my freshman and sophomore year of college, my grandmother was diagnosed with Alzheimer's and she was able to enroll into a stage three clinical trial.

Getting a sneak peak into clinical research gave me a lot of excitement as I was able to see how being a part of a study such as this one gave all the individuals participating in the study so much hope and purpose for helping not only themselves but also people down the line who will suffer with Alzheimer's. This was inspiring to me and through my studies I fell more in love with the brain but still did not know that I could be a scientist as a career. As I grew up it kind of was like, if you liked biology, you go to medical school. That is kind of what I thought. To beef up my resume, I decided to apply for an internship, and that happened to be in Dr. Murnane's laboratory.

This experience was crucial as it was the perfect storm to show me that research is a viable career path. I had heard of psychedelics but more in the stereotypical negative way “they'll fry your brain” but similar to Frances, our coursework along with Dr. Murnane's research showed me how truly interesting these substances are. What made psychedelics so interesting too is their potential to be extremely helpful in the context of psychiatry and mental health. This potential was really exciting to me as it felt that my research could, down the line, allow people to live happier and healthier lives, not just longer lives.

For my research, I essentially mimic what Frances is trying to do in humans. I try to recapitulate her cognitive measures in preclinical models of addiction and assess psychedelics' potential to treat methamphetamine addiction, which has not really been done before. It gets me really excited because there are so many studies that can be done in terms of dissecting the mechanisms or assessing the vulnerability factors that contribute to addiction. I do not think that psychedelics are a blanket magical thing that can help everybody, but maybe through understanding them better, we can figure out who can be helped the most.

I would say that I am in a similar boat as Cynthia, I never really came into this field, knowing that psychedelics were what I want to study, I kind of came into this field wanting to make a difference and realizing that psychedelics are something that can really make a difference for people. My love of them kind of happened through that and learning more about them and just how positive of an impact they can make on people's lives.

Sagrera: I am Caroline Sagrera, and I am a second year psychiatry resident at Emory. I am interested in psychedelics, because I have noticed it is one of the only thing that works at the root cause of some of my patients' suffering. From those receiving end-of-life care to those with treatment-resistant depression and still others with ruminative pathologies, such as obsessive-compulsive disorder, and anxiety disorders. I am excited about this movement. I am excited to offer it to my patients one day and to guide them through their own journey with therapy. That is why I am here. Thanks, everyone.

Dr. Aday: Thank you. Great to see that there are so many different backgrounds here. You have clinical psychology, experimental psychology, neuroscience, and behavioral pharmacology. And so hopefully, students from a wide variety of backgrounds can take something from this and have it be relevant to their path as well. Moving on to the next question, maybe we can talk about some of the issues you faced getting into the field of psychedelic science. What have been some of the biggest obstacles for you?

Kramer: I would love to jump in here. I remember, a long time ago, I think it was 2013–2014, I knew this was a field I wanted to pursue, and the biggest challenge I had was I felt like there were no academics I could talk to about this. There was not a lot of research going on at the time and I was afraid that I would be labeled as a crazy person someone who does not really know what they are talking about because this was not as clinically accepted at the time. So I did not really have anyone that I could talk to and I would always have to skirt around the subject when people were asking me what I wanted to pursue or what field I was interested in.

So it was really hard to find a way to get here. And to say that I was not able to do that is not true. You can see that there are other related things that you can discuss, such as cognition, what it is using to heal, such as substance use or depression. So the biggest challenge I found at the time was just being able to discuss the subject. As the years went on, I would say it was around maybe 2017, I finally felt like I could talk to PIs that I was working under and tell them what I was actually interested in. And once I was able to do that, they really could provide good guidance about: oh, hey, here are people that I have heard discussing this subject or something related to it.

So I think people who are trying to enter this area now have a big advantage because you can talk about it more freely. It is more well known. It is more accepted. There is more research. So that is a big thing that has changed in the past few years. And even still, when I started my PhD, I was still really nervous to tell people what I was working on, because I felt like they would not understand, even though I was actually doing this work, it still felt like, if I brought it up, people would still give me the side eye. But, I think it is really important that we continue to normalize this topic by talking about it because this is a legitimate area of research. And the more we continue to speak about it openly and freely, I think that is going to make things get easier and easier. So that was the biggest challenge for me.

Wood: I would say one thing that was really interesting was when I joined Dr. Murnane's laboratory as an intern, there were some students who were currently in his laboratory as PhD students who did not want to work on projects that involved psychedelics because they did not want their name in articles or publications with something that said “psychedelic.”

I thought that it was very interesting that people found the topic so stigmatizing, but as I learned more from Dr. Murnane on the topic, the more it seemed like an opportunity for me. I ended up picking up a lot of experiments and projects that involved psychedelics that other students were not as interested in. I think my open-mindedness to psychedelic research made it an opportunity and not necessarily an issue.

Dr. Mason: Can I ask, do you know what their fear was?

Wood: I am not exactly sure. I could speculate it has to do with all the sort of stereotypical scare stories one would hear about psychedelics, such as people jumping out of windows and having permanent hallucinations. These compounds for so long have been stigmatized and over the years the scary anecdotes create a fear that perpetuates very grandiose myths that seem present in every culture. Fortunately, I believe times are changing and we need to use science to facilitate a positive change in people's perceptions of these compounds. I think it just takes time for people to have their minds changed and see something in a new light.

Dr. Mason: When I was living in the United States, I did experience this, this stigma, this fear of the substances, I would say. Moving abroad (to Europe), there is still a stigma, but I have encountered a different one. It is more the question of “why.” Why do this research? It is not a fear that these drugs are going to make you go insane. But when you want to collaborate with people in different disciplines, or if you want to apply for a grant, and you really have to justify the “why”—why do you want to do this, with these “wacky” drugs.

What is the scientific benefit of this, which is a level of justification that you do not necessarily have to explain when you state “I'm studying antidepressants,” or “I'm studying medication to treat cancer,” or something like this. People generally inherently understand the importance of this, but I found that in order for people to take my work seriously—which as a scientist, of course, you should be able to explain the impact of your work—that you have to go the extra step to justify it. And this is getting easier every day with all these initial clinical trial results coming out. But this was something I noticed that my colleagues who were studying other things did not have to do.

Wood: Yeah, along those lines, I am not entirely sure what we were writing but I was phrasing psychedelics as a potential medicine with beneficial properties, and Dr. Murnane highlighted to me my naivety in the field and how the various funding agencies perceive psychedelics. We discussed how although we see the potential benefits as we study them, most people are still holding on to that stigma, so we have to be aware of that perception when writing grants to study these compounds. Stating it more as further characterizing their potential harm rather than potential good. More than other fields, I think we have to be really conscious of how our work is perceived.

Vest: I would just say, because I am doing clinical work, obviously there is a lot more regulatory stuff that goes into it. So, for example, Bo and I just went through our proposals and he was able to propose his research on psychedelics because he is working with rats and doing more mechanistic stuff. That is a lot easier to get approval for. But as of now, my dissertation is focused just around the methamphetamine research I am doing as kind of the basis for our clinical trials. And every time I present my seminars I lead up to the end like, “Oh, wouldn't a treatment that can affect all these different domains be awesome? Wow. We should really look into that,” trying to set up everyone so that once we do get things approved and everything is going like that can transition to being what my dissertation is on.

However, as of now, we are the first in Louisiana to do these clinical trials, so we are having to break down all these walls to establish this research. So that has definitely been a challenge of getting there. Along the way, I think in terms of support, people around the institution are interested, but they are glad to see that we are the ones struggling with it and not themselves. I think we are just the right amount of crazy and passionate to keep going and pushing through.

Ortiz: I was just going to say, kind of going off of both what you, Frances, and Natasha were saying about being these preliminary people in the field: When I first started grad school and got into this field, I think the most nerve-wracking thing for me are some issues around getting things approved or getting things done. Like you have to have every answer for every question to get things approved, and as a very early researcher, that is very difficult.

I am just starting my career in this world of research, and although I did a little bit of research in undergrad, it was definitely not to this extent. I needed to learn all of the ins and outs of what psychedelics are: what they do, what is going on in the world with them from neurochemical points to also behavioral and clinical points. Even though I am just in clinical psychology and am focusing more on individuals, people expect me to know everything under the sun about psychedelics, and that can be tough when you are first starting out.

Dr. Aday: When I was getting into this field, I was in an experimental psychology program, so by definition that is a very broad program where there are a lot of people doing very different research. We had me doing the psychedelic stuff, we had people doing work on things such as psychology of jury decisions and memory researchers. So everyone is doing very, very different research. Because of that and the stigma at the time, I found it very isolating and hard to talk to others about this field that I was super excited about.

Especially when I was just starting to read the articles and get involved, that is when you are the most excited. So that was definitely a bummer not to have people around to talk about it with. I think, perhaps more focused programs such as pharmacology and neuroscience programs probably have more people with more overlapping interests, so that is a consideration when considering graduate programs.

And then also, as Bo mentioned, funding is really difficult to get in this area, even for established, top tier researchers who have been doing this kind of research for decades. It is not easy to get money for psychedelic studies, especially from the traditional routes of grant funds. A lot of the funding is coming from philanthropy or industry. And as a grad student, you do not really have ties with any of those at all.

So you are very, very much, dependent on your advisor, it seems like, for getting those kinds of funds. So for me, I think those are the biggest things—having people to talk about it with, and where do I even get money for this? And I would say that, luckily, both of those things seem to be improving. There is more money starting to come into the field, and it is much easier to talk about it with people than it was five or six years ago.

Dr. Mason: Yeah, I definitely agree. Again, as well as the stigma side of it, another issue was there was not a field to get into, at least no clear path to the field at that time. But I think that psychedelic researchers of the future now have this kind of opposite problem: that there is so much interest, there is a big hype around it, and that there is actually so much competition for it. In our departments, we have research master's programs in neuropsychology and drug development. I would say half of these students now come because we have a psychedelic research line, and they come because they want to do an internship with us.

So a few years ago, anybody who asked us for an internship, you get an internship, we have a spot for you, but now we actually have to do interviews where we can easily be interviewing 10 students per quarter, and we can only take a few. So it is not that this should have been the rationale in the first place, but it is not enough just to say, I am interested in psychedelic drugs, I am interested in psychedelic research.

Now, since there is such an interest, you really have to be focused on your interest in psychedelic research and what? What is your niche? What do you want to use them for? What do you want to investigate about them? I think that needs to be clearer earlier on because there are so many people now wanting to get into this field.

Dr. Aday: Absolutely, and that kind of leads into some of our other questions about things you can do to stand out. If that is the case that you need to have psychedelics and X to combine it with, then developing skills in X can help you to get to where you want to be within the psychedelic space too, even if it is not directly related to psychedelics at first. So, for example, if you are interested in psychedelics and cognition, you can develop skills in cognitive psychology beforehand. Yeah, lots more to talk about there once we are talking about specific skills to bring to the field. But first, any other considerations for issues getting into the field for you?

Sagrera: I think downstream from all of you guys being on the clinical side, the main issue for us is we need to continue seeing research being done to petition to our health care establishments that this is a necessary treatment to create infrastructure for and to provide. It is a joy to see that so much funding is being sent in this direction now, because this has been an issue for us getting it started in Louisiana. Now that we do have funding in certain establishments, for example, intravenous ketamine treatments, the issue is just finding a facility that does it—expanding accessibility. I think it is still an exclusive option for only certain people. As we progress, hopefully it just becomes more widely accessible.

Dr. Aday: We have kind of touched on this next question a bit, but maybe we can just have any last thoughts here. How have your colleagues responded to your work? Stigma? Support? Exuberance? All of the above?

Wood: I feel like my colleagues' responses have been diverse. I think a lot of the students in my cohort and department are supportive and open-minded; however, I have encountered individuals who are skeptical and need data to have their mind changed. So it has been a process of having conversations and explaining why these compounds are meaningful and the incredible research that has already been done. There has been hesitation, but people are definitely coming around to it more.

Sagrera: I think there is largely a positive response at my current program. I think at academic institutions, there is usually a positive response when psychedelics are brought up. There is obviously stigma in some pockets. One thing that I think is interesting that I am hearing about here as far as attitude and perceptions toward psychedelics is people are eager actually to learn about the full spectrum of experiences.

I think there is usually a positive experience portrayed and it is kind of pushed as this treatment that will cure you. We are actually having a few patients who are presenting with experiences that are not negative necessarily, but they are not coming out with feeling like they are cured. I think it is also interesting to look into the full spectrum of experience to give people an accurate understanding or expectations of what could happen after these treatments.

Dr. Aday: Yeah, absolutely critical, especially with all the hype right now, people can feel like if it does not work for them, it is their fault. They think they failed because all they are hearing is that it works. So I think it is critical, like you said, to reflect everybody's experiences, to normalize that.

Vest: Yeah. I would say that is one of the things I appreciate that Dr. Hendricks has been emphasizing in articles and interviews, where he has been saying that we are not expecting this to be a perfect solution to everything or for everyone, but if it can help even just a little bit more people, then that is a massive leap forward.

Sagrera: 100%. Yeah. I think a lot of people are on board with that idea here, too. It feels good to have that positive support for the future of psychedelics, current and future.

Ortiz: To add on, I think for the most part my peers have been pretty supportive, but I think they are maybe more in that hype cycle and like “Oh, this is amazing! Psychedelics are so cool!” especially if they have used psychedelics themselves. But as a researcher I approach things with a lot of skepticism for anything and really try having a balanced approach. Peter always goes to me for my opinions on some things because he knows I am more skeptical than others on a lot of things and less involved in the hype cycles. So, for me, it can be difficult to be on that other end where people are so enthusiastic or want to involve themselves in my research or what we are doing in the laboratory just because they think psychedelics are cool or can be the cure-all for everything.

And then I am kind of taking that step back. I am like, well, it could help people. It could also not help people. As Caroline mentioned, seeing, and I have noted even just in our trials, there have been some difficult experiences. I think that is important for me to be able to bring to others, but it can be difficult to go against that hype cycle. On the other end thinking about the clinical patients I work with, our population is a little different here in Alabama where there is a lot of skepticism just in the general population. So psychedelics are not something that is met with a lot of enthusiasm when talking to the layperson about.

Kramer: I would say for me at the university level, my colleagues are very interested, very curious. They are very supportive in seeing what the data say and they are excited that this work is happening. Interestingly, like friends and family, when I talk to them about it, I am from the Northeast and they are very open-minded. They are very interested. They are hearing about it in the news, so I think they are also very supportive to hear what the science has to say. And like everybody's saying, I also like to be very skeptical because with this hype cycle, everybody is acting like it is a cure-all. This is the best thing ever.

But I am also very cautious because people could get harmed and that would absolutely set us so far back. So I am also very open to listening about negative experiences and things to be cautious about. I think as members of this field, it is very important that we listen to those negative things and amplify it because it is very easy to be supportive and excited. And I think it is important for us to stay level-headed and make sure we share this sort of information, these negative things, because they can get buried. Personally the reactions I am getting are supportive, excited, and curious. So it is important to make sure that we provide the most accurate information.

Dr. Aday: Awesome. All right, well, thank you, everybody. Yeah, so moving on, we will talk about specific skills that have been useful for you. What specific skills have helped you succeed as a psychedelic researcher? For example, things such as coding experience, survey scoring, project management, any types of specific skills, especially for those who came from an institution without a background in psychedelic research. How did you develop skills that allowed you to get into psychedelic research?

Wood: I guess for this question, it really is specific to what you are interested in, right? So for me it was pharmacology. So working in a laboratory was crucial as I was able to learn how to do various procedures required to study the pharmacology of psychedelics such as surgeries, injections, and basic laboratory techniques. I really think if you are going to choose a career as a scientist, it is extremely important that you are open-minded because in 20 years, psychedelics might not be a funded topic of research.

You have got to be able to pivot and use your tools that you gained by becoming a psychedelic researcher to then apply it to something new or something different. At the end of the day, like, yes, we are psychedelic researchers, but the keyword is researcher, the psychedelic is something that might not be there forever.

Dr. Mason: Yeah, I 100% agree with you. Indeed, if you remove the “psychedelic” out of it, it is really what it takes to be a researcher. But are there any skills that you all can think of that helped you particularly with the psychedelic aspect? I can give an example. I have run experimental drug trials also with substances that are not psychedelics (such as cannabis). And I experienced that, to be a good researcher with participants who are undergoing our psychedelic trials (vs our other drug trials), I need to also be a good “people person.”

So we are asking people to come in, we are giving them a substance and we are asking them to be very vulnerable with us, right? Their consciousness is severely altered, they are confused, they are emotionally labile, a lot of things are going on and we are asking them to do cognitive tasks, get in the magnetic resonance imaging scanner, take blood samples, and so on. So you have to be very empathetic, I think, in this type of situation, and be aware of what you are asking somebody to do, and also be able to help them while they are in this vulnerable state with you.

This is a particular key facet that I did not think about when I said I want to do psychedelic research, that I also have to take care of somebody in a vulnerable (psychedelic) state. And this is a skill that I have not necessarily had to have in other drug trials. Of course, as a researcher, you always want to make sure your participant is doing well, but it is a different type of vulnerability and caring for your participants in the psychedelic state.

Vest: Yeah, I would absolutely agree with that. We are not at the psychedelic trial yet, and just interviewing these people about their addictions, having that empathy is so important because you do not want them to feel like a laboratory rat while you are just sitting there asking them difficult and sometimes uncomfortable questions. As important as empathy is in this setting, I can clearly see how even more crucial it will be once we are providing psychedelic treatment. This is not the kind of field where you can just hand someone a questionnaire to fill out, you have to really be present with your participants and gain their trust.

Otherwise, one of the skills you mentioned, Jake, that has been important for myself is project management. That has been a big one for me because psychedelic research is not my main project right now “on paper.” So I have had to manage my ongoing research while also having to put in the work on the side, trying to get all the regulatory stuff going, meeting with various companies to supply the psilocybin, and so on. For myself, project management has been a massive skill that I have had to conquer, but it does not seem like I am alone in that. As mentioned earlier, there is not a lot of funding available for psychedelic research right now, so I think a lot of our mentors have had to face this issue of not being able to put all of their focus on psychedelic research.

Sagrera: In addition to empathy, I think something that is critical to have as a psychedelic researcher is curiosity. Of course, this is something that every researcher needs to have, but within psychedelic research specifically, I would say that you need to have a certain curiosity to be psychologically minded, a curiosity about these ineffable spiritual experiences. We all come across people in our day-to-day who have varying ideas of what is possible, what is real, what is important as far as these kinds of experiences. I think to research psychedelics, you need to also be open-minded to some of these experiences being true for the participant. It is important to acknowledge these experiences as being helpful and validate them as your participants traverse these ineffable experiences.

Ortiz: Yeah, I think that brings up a really good point on this idea of curiosity and openness. Even if you have worked in this field for a while, or maybe you had your own psychedelic experience or whatever, or a friend of a friend or anything like that, the need to be open to the idea that not every experience is going to be the same. And even, again, if you had your own psychedelic experience, your experience is not going to be the same as the next person or as the next person. So I think that is a really important part for research: this idea that we have some general ideas and there is a lot of common themes, and at the same time there is still a lot of wiggle room for curiosity to come into play and for us to research more and fill in as many gaps as possible.

Wood: I think that is a really important point, especially as a psychedelic researcher in the preclinical space, being okay not having the answers. When using a preclinical model, you are always giving your best effort to accurately reflect the human experience, which gets a lot more difficult when wanting to recapitulate what Caroline was saying, this ineffable spiritual experience. It is like, how am I supposed to model that in animals? How am I supposed to do these things? So there is definitely a need to be okay with not being able to have all the answers and just treating the data as what it is.

Kramer: Yeah, I would say from the preclinical side, I think the question is more geared toward researcher skills in general. I do not think we really get that psychedelic part pulled out. It is really kind of like we are testing any drug, but I think important skills that you need are basic researcher skills such as attention to detail. When you are studying pharmacology, you are looking for these tiny specific changes, like maybe a single receptor, a single gene. So you really have to be teasing through the literature, looking really closely at those sorts of things to find where there is overlap with what you are studying, the psychedelic stuff and what has already been done antidepressants, studying depression, substance use, those sorts of things.

Also, having project management multitasking skills, you are not always working on the same thing. You are working on multiple things at once. It is not always part of the same project. So putting on different hats, like, okay, I am working in this realm and that realm. So the skills I think on a preclinical side for a psychedelic researcher really apply to any sort of preclinical researcher, in general.

Kramer: Sorry. I just remembered that. I was going to say, I remember CJ had a really good perspective about all the different areas that can encompass psychedelic research. So maybe he can comment on that when he has this chance to look over. I just wanted to add that.^‡

Dr. Aday: For me, the number one thing I think was having experience in academic writing, being able to write in that style and being able to do it efficiently. It is not a trivial thing to pick up. It does take a lot of time and it is something you have to kind of struggle through a lot, I think, at first. And you have to be kind of comfortable with being bad at it and taking feedback from advisors and mentors and doing that to improve your writing. I think, as a researcher, writing is one of the most important things that you do. It is how you disseminate your research primarily. It is the way people are going to interact with your research and interpret it is through your writing. And so I think it is really important to develop that skill.

In addition to that, just basic skills such as learning how to score surveys, program cognitive tasks, and things like that. Those are things I also did during my master's degree in the laboratory that allowed me to hit the ground running when I actually got the chance to do psychedelic research. If I was trying to learn all those other things at the same time as I was trying to learn all the psychedelic stuff, I probably would have been pretty overwhelmed. So I think for me, developing some basic research skills first and then applying them to psychedelics was really helpful.

Dr. Mason: This has been touched upon a bit, but another thing I would like to add in regard to more specific psychedelic research skills would be creativity and openness. The bottom line is, currently these studies are difficult to run. They are expensive to run. There is a lot of regulatory frameworks that get in the way, but there are still ways to contribute to this space without a clinical trial. So Jake, as you said, you entered the field with literature reviews, with naturalistic studies.

So if necessary, openness and the desire and ability to invest in making collaborations in this psychedelic space—sometimes collaborating with groups that you never thought you would—maybe you are in the Amazon with shamans collecting naturalistic data. But finding a way to push those boundaries to be able to contribute to this space, because a lot of us have these boundaries, especially as an early career researcher, they are initially hard to push.

Dr. Aday: Yeah, great point. I think that was something I forgot to mention, but what was also really helpful for me was reaching out to people that were established in the field. “Hey, I have an idea for a paper. Do you want to work on it?” And I do not think they would have taken me seriously or even probably even answered my email if I did not show them that I had already published other articles and could do this—because they were not going to walk me through the whole process of how to write a research article they had to have seen that I could do it, to some degree at least, before.

So I think having some base articles or research background and then also having the initiative and being able to put yourself out on a limb and being willing to be shut down or rejected or not answered to at all is also really helpful.

Dr. Mason: Yeah, definitely put yourself out there with a strong goal or research question. It is not an unguided “I want to do psychedelic research,” but rather should be “I want to investigate X about psychedelic substances because of this, and this is why I should be the person to do this.” This clear, goal-directed, and to-the-point communication to individuals in the field can go a long way.

Ortiz: Going off of what Jacob was saying too, I think this idea of patience and resilience, which can be really difficult when you are starting off as an early researcher. In the larger scope of research and publishing, there is a lot of rejection. It could be the best article ever and you will still get it rejected. So having that idea of to keep going after the rejection, whether that is a research article or a grant or contacting someone else for a collaboration, having that patience and resiliency to move past it and get to where you want to be.

Dr. Mason: Okay, shall we move to the next question then? So we are all from different fields, and I am curious as to what we see as important future research directions. So in our respective fields, what do we see important in the psychedelic space in 5, 10, and 20 years?

Kramer: This is not quite within my area of expertise, but I am very interested in how we could, or if it is possible to even do group therapy with psychedelic compounds. I know that there is a big cost issue with these one-on-one sessions, and so if we have group sessions, it can potentially decrease the cost of that. So is that something that is even possible? Will it be done? I certainly hope to see this answered in the next few years.

Ortiz: Thinking about the therapeutic space and the world of clinical psychology, I think it is important to have someone there, if they are taking it therapeutically, that is trained clinically on some level. Because there are so many different things that could happen both during the psychedelic experience and during integration or whatever you want to call that experience afterward. I would like to see maybe more of that training. I think there are some beneficial spaces that have people who are untrained that are having these ceremonies or these experiences, but also, I have heard a lot of negative experiences from those places.

From people who are untrained who just happen to have the substance and, because they have had beneficial experiences, they want to bring it to everyone. But there is a lot that can happen with these substances. They have some pretty serious and intense effects, whether they are good or bad effects, they are serious and intense. So having someone who is trained clinically to be able to help the patient and really put that patient first above all else.

Sagrera: Yeah, going off of that, something that I am curious about as a clinician in this field is where it will be offered and what the future of widely affordable and accessible psychedelic medicine looks like. If that is continuing to be an office setting, that is fine—it is controlled there, and I think that is important. At the same time, how can we make it more widely accessible in a safe way? Something that Cynthia touched on is these other ceremonies, these outside gatherings… These things happen. Are they bad?

Of course, there needs to be someone who knows what they are doing to guide them. I am wondering as a clinician if we will be invited to these spaces that are outside of our hospitals to help guide these healing experiences? Or should that be something that we adopt into a private practice? I am curious about how to maximize accessibility while also maintaining safety. I am curious about better understanding what our offering and the space will look like as we progress in the future.

Ortiz: Recently, Peter had brought up a really good point that I did not think about, this idea that he does not necessarily want to advocate or push super hard right now for legal recreational use of these psychedelics, because then, drug production agencies and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and all those people who would be able to put regulations or insurance companies, they will not want to invest or fund or cover these things because they are like, “well, you can just go to your local corner store and grab it. Why would we cover it with insurance?”

And so that can be an issue for accessibility is, yeah, it would be great to not have so many criminal regulations on it, and at the same time, that balance of, if we still keep it in a little bubble, insurance companies and places like that will be more likely to want to cover it.

Vest: I would say for my field of behavioral pharmacology, I think the forward and backward translational research is really important, in general, but especially for psychedelic research because of how unique the experience is. And even within our laboratory, as Bo said, a lot of his preclinical research is modeled after the clinical research that I do. Speaking to these people who are going through addiction and recovering from it, and learning more about their drug use patterns, it has been so informative. I often have to convince other researchers that people really do use drugs in certain ways, because they have mostly just read articles of studies that had very specific inclusion/exclusion criteria, such as specific drug use histories.

It has made me realize how important it is to be informed about the real-life experiences that people are having, especially when it comes to psychiatric conditions, so that we can inform the preclinical research. On the other side, as we do more mechanistic stuff in the preclinical work, we can inform how we use these substances in the clinical trials where we are looking at duration of therapeutic effects and things like that.

Wood: Yeah, I guess to piggyback off of that, I would hope in the next five years, it would be really cool to figure out a really optimal model of addiction that allows psychedelics to inform us more so than the traditional ones that we have. But that is a pretty big ask. I would also say I think it would be really interesting to see if we can uncover if the profound spiritual experience is necessary for the short- and long-term effects. There is also a lot of interest around compounds with shorter durations of action, so it will be interesting to uncover what components of these compounds are necessary for the lasting therapeutic effects we have seen thus far.

Dr. Aday: Yeah, I agree. That is totally the most interesting question for me right now—why do these things work therapeutically? And there are so many different answers for that. People say cognitive flexibility, they say awe, mystical experiences, changes in therapeutic alliance, ego dissolution, emotional breakthrough, neuroplasticity, and inflammation. Is it all these things? Is it one of these things? Is it some of these things for certain populations? And if it is, what are the odds that one molecule can have that many diverse applications? It is just really interesting.

Kramer: And what is tough is in the preclinical side, we cannot ask an animal if it has had a spiritual experience, and we only have so many output models for how we can assess these things. The forced swim test is a classic antidepressant drug screening tool that we use. And how great is it really? How well does it translate to what everyone is seeing in the clinic?

And although it provides this baseline and this screening tool that we can use, ultimately, I do not think that these animal models are really going to be able to support these ideas that we actually have. And a lot of the things that we want to test, I think will have to be done in humans. So, maybe at some point we transition more to human models so we can test these experimental questions. Will the FDA even allow these sorts of things to take place? If we want to do these sort of spiritual type experiments, it is not going to work out in animal models.

Dr. Aday: Yeah, I think that is why it is useful to have people from many different backgrounds here and represented in the field as well. One thing that has occurred to me is it is kind of interesting that you could almost imagine having a psychedelic researcher in any department at a university—chemistry, botany, psychology, history, law, art, music, anthropology, and philosophy—they all kind of intersect with psychedelics to some degree. So I think, to the degree that you can have as much interdisciplinary discussions and information as possible, that is super useful.

Dr. Mason: Yeah, exactly. And also we need all of this interdisciplinary knowledge in the space, right? If you take law, for example, intellectual property rights—this field is advancing, drugs are being developed, intellectual property rights are all becoming very significant. We see a lot of conversations about this. I even recently met a specifically psychedelic patent lawyer.

But this need is there to balance these rights that come with product development, these commercial interests, with the rights and access for patients and other users. So I think this is something that is going to be an important area to pay attention to in the next five years or so, as more and more people and different types of people are getting interested in this field and the potential money that they feel they can make from it.

Vest: I think another consideration, just as we move forward, is with the different regulations within the different countries, such as, is the United States going to be left behind because of our regulations? That has been one of the difficult things with trying to start our clinical trial is a lot of these companies that are selling pharmaceutical grade psilocybin are based in Canada, where Health Canada has different rules than the FDA does. Some of the companies are like, “oh, well we're selling to Australia that has all these trials going forward,” like, that is great, but that does not really help us here. So I think it will be interesting how in the United States they handle this transition.

Dr. Aday: Yeah, that is a great point that we have not really touched on at all. This is all very US-centric. Generally, I would say, other than Natasha, I think we are all here in the United States, so considerations probably will vary a bit by region.

Dr. Mason: Is there anything else anyone wants to add? Important future research directions within your own fields? Or any methodological or theoretical issues that are rising that future psychedelic researchers can address?

Sagrera: I think something I touched on in the beginning is important to address, which is evaluating all of the experiences people are having and actually publishing more work that talks about the full range of experiences. It may seem counterintuitive, but some people may look at psychedelics as this craze, as this phase of people saying, “This is a miracle treatment.” In certain crowds it builds popularity, but in other crowds it devalues it. I think it is important to have more data that is actually highlighting the full range of experiences, some of them maybe being negative, so that we can have a complete picture and a more honest portrayal of what a psychedelic treatment experience is like.

Wood: Yeah, on the preclinical side, I think it goes back to just data are data, we are the ones that put the good or bad connotation on it. It is our job to just report the data and not be upset.

Dr. Mason: So to summarize, we have spoken about skills that can be important for early psychedelic researchers and researchers in general. We have spoken about where we came from, what our knowledge background is, what our niches are. But the final question is, how can somebody be involved in the field as a young researcher or student? So here, we are talking about opportunities for both undergraduates, graduate students outside of research activities. Things such as harm reduction, volunteer work, do you think these are valuable activities people can pursue and that would be helpful for them in the psychedelics research space in their future?

Dr. Aday: The main, most direct pipeline to get involved in psychedelic research is to volunteer as a research assistant in a psychedelic laboratory. But of course, as we have touched on, those opportunities are pretty few and far between. So it is important to look for other opportunities to get involved in the field, like Natasha mentioned. For me, I saw that this organization called Drug Science had posted a position a couple years ago on Twitter looking for a honorary research assistant, so I applied for that and got it.

That led to me collaborating on a couple of reviews with some international researchers I never would have met or talked to otherwise. That was a huge opportunity for me. So I recommend staying as plugged in to the field as possible through things such as social media and your network to be sure you are aware of such opportunities. Volunteering to assist with harm reduction at festivals and things like that is another useful way of developing your expertise around psychedelics and gaining relevant experience.

Dr. Mason: One thing that I did when I was an undergraduate and desperately searching for a way to get in the field is join relevant organizations. Students for Sensible Drug Policy, for example, I restarted a chapter at University of Wisconsin-Madison. So the aim of this organization is to destigmatize substances, and I started hosting events around campus, hoping to educate people about the actual harms of these substances versus their perceived harms. On a personal level though, it actually just got me started in figuring out how to talk about drugs to a general population.

So people who are not in the field or enthusiastic or had experience, and how to talk about this topic in a way that was not emotionally charged or biased. This was really helpful for me, for when I started talking to scientists who also were coming from a similar viewpoint as the people I interacted with during these harm reduction events we organized.

Also, we did a lot of harm reduction work at concerts, for example, giving out flyers on what substances not to mix, and recommended doses, warning signs, and so on. With this, I had a lot of conversations with people who are under the influence, and that helped me for my own research, where I am doing exactly that, dealing with people and talking to people under the influence. I do think that that has helped me, also gave me a better idea of what I was going into if I was going to be giving these individuals, my research participants' drugs like these.

Dr. Aday: One other thing I would recommend is being careful about paying for things. I know there are a lot of things springing up right now like seminars and classes you can take online that are super expensive, and I guess I just recommend being wary of those kinds of things. I do not think that there is too much that you could get out of those types of seminars and lectures that you could not get out of watching talks on YouTube, reading the literature, and utilizing the many free resources that are starting to become available.

So my recommendation for getting involved in the field is just be very careful about spending money and giving it away to people, because there are a lot of people trying to get into the space and leverage money out of others. So be very careful about spending money because there are so many things that you can do to get involved that are inexpensive.

Wood: I would say if you have an idea of what you are interested in, using PubMed or Google, you are able to look at these topics or fields. You are able to familiarize yourself with people doing this kind of research. There is just so much out there, getting started on familiarizing yourself with the literature that is out there will put you in a position to advocate for yourself when opportunities arise, like Jake was saying about being able to write reviews early on as he was informed and able to advocate for his work. It is so important to continue to be curious, follow your questions, and set yourself up well for when the opportunities will arise.

Kramer: Just to jump on top of that, I think finding researchers you look up to, whose work you are really, really interested in will help guide you to find those conversations. Sometimes it can be really hard to get in touch with a PI, but pay attention to who their graduate students are. They are probably more accessible, reach out to them. And yes, I definitely agree, you have to be cautious about paying for things, but I will say it is something that really worked for me. Ten years ago, there really were not many psychedelic conferences happening, let alone small ones. And so I went to a few small psychedelic conferences and that gave me access to the researchers that I was following. I actually was able to go up and talk to them and make those connections and actually follow through with an email and get them to respond.

So, I do agree, there is a lot of stuff out there now. As far as what you can pay for content, programs, conferences, and they can be very expensive, so look for small things because they definitely exist and find those connections and networks that you can create and those people will see your initiative. Do some sort of volunteer work build that sort of resume on your own to show people that you are serious, and this is really what you want to do, because if you just show up saying, oh, I read your work, I am really interested, and you have got nothing else to really contribute, they are going to see you are not really invested in it.

The more you do this, the more excited you will be because really seeing other people in the field be excited and passionate about this is just going to drive you even more. So it is not as it is not as difficult as it sounds, it should hopefully fuel you even more.

Sagrera: I came into this field through an academic institution, and I think what was super helpful for me getting involved is simply reaching out to someone who works in research at my program. At an academic institution, you will usually have access to someone doing research. My advice is to just walk up to that person or email them and say, “Hey, I'm interested in psychedelics. What are the opportunities available?” As someone coming in without much research experience, you may not always have a well-developed research question that you want to ask.

You may not always have the background or know-how to look at the literature or know where to begin with performing original research. Just literally asking the question to someone who knows more than you is important. They can give you a menu of options of potential projects or opportunities. They can point you in the direction of a topic you may be interested in. In my opinion, this is the easiest option for how to get involved.

Ortiz: Yeah, I was going to say something similar of just getting those basic research skills. And that does not necessarily have to be from a psychedelic-based laboratory, because we know there are very few laboratories where undergrads are able to join. So at an undergraduate level, building those core research skills, those academic research skills, starting to get your feet wet with how to write articles, how to evaluate literature, how to present posters and talks, and then working your way up. It is not a sprint, it is a marathon, and it is going to take a while to kind of get to where you want to go. We have had people come into the laboratory that have been excited about the research that we do, and then they are also like, “oh, hey, for my honors thesis, I want to administer psilocybin and then do all this,” and it is like, “OK, well, that's maybe not quite realistic.”

You would never graduate on time because we know how difficult and lengthy studies can be. We are limited in what we can do, just thinking about timelines, it takes so long to start up a psychedelic trial here in the United States, because of the regulations, Drug Enforcement Administration, FDA, all of that stuff, and finding funding. It is worth figuring out where you can still be involved, where maybe you are not doing your dream job right now, but that is OK. There are still ways to be involved, and knowing this is not the end of the road for you.

Vest: I was just going to touch upon outside of the research experience, one of the biggest skills we spoke about being useful is having empathy. So, for example, if you are trying to go the clinical route, whatever indication you are really passionate about, find opportunities to volunteer in that kind of setting, whatever it may look like where you are, like an addiction treatment center or something of the such. As well, I know there is the Fireside Project that is kind of more recent. That is like a hotline for anyone who is going through a psychedelic experience that might just need someone to talk to. I think they have events and ways that you can volunteer for that as well. So just ways of practicing those skills around psychedelics that we have mentioned previously.

Kramer: And I just want to add that when you are at a university you are an undergrad, you have so many resources. So take advantage of that while you are there, because once you get out of that university system, it is definitely harder to get yourself back in. As an undergrad, you can easily get into a laboratory as a research assistant or volunteer. I got more into everything after I graduated, so I really had to dig my way back to make connections.

As far as going to conferences, I think I actually volunteered at some to avoid having to pay for those things. So that is another way to get access to those meetings, by volunteering, because you do not have to be at every talk, especially if you are really there to make connections and network. So just volunteer, it builds your resume, it is going to connect you with organizers and you might make more valuable connections than if you were just an attendee.

So, certainly while you are an undergrad, you have a lot more resources at your fingertips. And once you get out of there, it is a little bit harder. You really have to dig a little bit more to make those connections to get back in. But what I did find is once I did get back into a laboratory, it was like I was relinked into that whole system again. It was easy to bounce to a new laboratory and make more connections while I was there. So do not be discouraged if you get interested in this field once you have graduated from your bachelor's. You can still get back into it. It just takes a little bit more work but just keep trying.