Board of Directors
Alan K. Davis, PhD.
President & Founding Director
Dr. Alan Davis is President and founding director of Source Research Foundation. They are an Associate Professor and Director of the Center for Psychedelic Drug Research and Education in the College of Social Work at the Ohio State University. Their research involves the exploration of psychedelic substance use in community, ceremonial/spiritual, and clinical settings. They conduct clinical trials examining the efficacy of psychedelic-assisted therapy for treating depression, fibromyalgia, co-occurring depression and alcohol misuse, and PTSD. They also facilitate educational programming about psychedelic science for students, communities, and clinicians. They have published more than 90 scientific articles on topics from substance use/misuse, harm reduction and benefit enhancement, as well as several studies of the clinical use of psychedelics for mental health and substance use disorder treatment.
Yarelix Estrada, MPH.
Vice President & Co-Chair of the Travel Award Review Committee
Yarelix Estrada is a first-generation Central American, drug policy and harm reduction researcher, and community outreach worker. Yarelix works as a City Research Scientist with the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene conducting community-based substance use harm reduction outreach and research. Her work is currently largely focused on implementation of the first drug checking research study in New York City with local syringe service programs. She is also the director of the New York City Psychedelic Society, is on the Board of Directors for the Tennessee Recovery Alliance, on the Advisory Board of the media group Psymposia and is an organizer with the Urban Survivors Union and the Alliance for Collaborative Drug Checking. She received her Master of Science in Public Health in Health Policy at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
Brooke J. Arterberry, PhD.
Founding Director & Treasurer
Dr. Brooke J. Arterberry is currently a Research Investigator in Youth and Social Issues in the Survey Research Center at the University of Michigan Institute for Social Research. She received her Ph.D. in Counseling Psychology at the University of Missouri, M.S. in Counseling and Counselor Education at Indiana University, and B.A. in Psychology and English at the University of Southern Indiana. Her research focuses on understanding the developmental risks associated with substance use (e.g., alcohol and cannabis use/co-use) using a socio-ecological perspective and polysubstance use framework. She is also interested in the development of efficacious intervention/prevention programs aimed at reducing adolescent and young adult substance use behaviors that result in negative consequences. Because of her training experiences, Dr. Arterberry believes mentorship and supporting students in opportunities to pursue their research passions will aid in understanding the differences in recreational and medicinal uses of substances – especially within the burgeoning area of psychedelic research.
Rafaelle L. Lancelotta, MS.
Founding Director, Secretary & Co-Chair of the Travel Award Review Committee
Rafael Lancelotta is a PhD student at The Ohio State University College of Social Work studying the importance of human relationship in psychedelic-assisted therapy. They have worked as a somatic-focused, trauma-informed therapist who has supported clients use of cannabis and ketamine to facilitate the therapeutic process. They are passionate about increasing accessibility and responsible clinical applications of psychedelics/entheogens for minority populations. They received their Masters degree in Mental Health Counseling from the University of Wyoming. They are also the administrator of 5meodmt.org, which is a forum dedicated to forming community discussions on harm reduction, integration, and safe practices around 5-MeO-DMT.
Lynnette A. Averill, PhD.
Founding Director & Student Grant Program Review Committee Chair
Dr. Lynnette “Nette” A. Averill is a clinical research psychologist at the National Center for PTSD-Clinical Neurosciences Division (NCPTSD-CND) at the VA Connecticut and Yale School of Medicine Department of Psychiatry. She earned her PhD at the University of Utah after completing a clinical internship at the Michael E. DeBakey VA Medical Center in Houston, TX. Her fellowship training emphasized the neurobiology of PTSD and pharmacoimaging trials, focused on the novel, investigational antidepressant ketamine and multi-method magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and spectroscopy (MRS). In addition to her work with ketamine clinical trials, Dr. Averill is collaborating on an MDMA neuroimaging study and had the opportunity to complete portions of the training in MDMA-assisted psychotherapy for PTSD under the mentorship of Michael and Annie Mithoefer. She is especially interested in novel pharmacologic interventions with potential to provide rapid and robust improvements in symptoms, including chronic PTSD and suicidality.
Dr. Diana Quinn, ND.
Board Member & Community Grant Program Review Committee Chair
Diana Quinn ND (she/her) is a queer Chicana and naturopathic doctor with a clinical focus in integrative mental health, somatics, and mind-body medicine. She is a graduate of the CIIS Psychedelic-Assisted Therapies and Research program. Her work is grounded in healing justice, a framework that reimagines wholeness at the intersection of intergenerational trauma, current structures of oppression, and a generative and co-created future. She co-founded Psychedelic Liberation Collective, recipient of the 2021 Source Research Foundation Community Grant and BIPOC Award. Dr. Quinn is the Assistant Director of Community Care at the Naropa University Center for Psychedelic Studies, and serves on multiple advisory boards dedicated to building ethical integrity, equity, accessibility, and structural competency in the field of psychedelics.
Dawn D. Davis, PhD
Founding Director
Dawn D. Davis is a Tribal person belonging to the Shoshone-Bannock Tribes. She holds a master’s degree from the University of Arizona where she researched the conservation and sustainability of Peyote, a Native medicine, within its natural habitat. She continues to discuss endangerment levels of Peyote and preservation efforts nationally and internationally. Dawn also holds a PhD from the University of Idaho studying her first medicine, water, with an emphasis in Law, Management, and Policy. She is actively working with the current administration of the Native American Church of North America including a role with the National Congress of the American Indian regarding Peyote legislative issues.
Monnica Williams, PhD.
Board Member
Dr. Monnica T. Williams is a board-certified licensed clinical psychologist and Associate Professor at the University of Ottawa, in the School of Psychology, where she is the Canada Research Chair in Mental Health Disparities. She is also the Clinical Director of the Behavioral Wellness Clinic in Connecticut, where she provides supervision and training to clinicians for empirically-supported treatments. Prior to her move to Canada, Dr. Williams was on the faculty of the University of Pennsylvania Medical School (2007-2011), the University of Louisville in Psychological and Brain Sciences (2011-2016), where she served as the Director of the Center for Mental Health Disparities, and the University of Connecticut (2016-2019). Dr. Williams’ research focuses on African American mental health, culture, and psychopathology, and she has published over 100 scientific articles on these topics. Current projects include the assessment of race-based trauma, unacceptable thoughts in OCD, improving cultural competence in the delivery of mental health care services, and interventions to reduce racism. This includes her work as a PI in a multisite study of MDMA-assisted psychotherapy for PTSD for people of color. She also gives diversity trainings nationally for clinical psychology programs, scientific conferences, and community organizations. Dr. Williams is a member of the American Psychological Association (APA), having served as the diversity delegate from Kentucky for the APA State Leadership Conference for two consecutive years. She has served as the African American SIG leader for Association of Behavioral and Cognitive Therapies (ABCT), and she serves as an associate editor of The Behavior Therapist and New Ideas in Psychology. She also serves on the editorial board ofCognitive Behaviour Therapy, and the Journal of Obsessive Compulsive and Related Disorders. She is a member of the Scientific Advisory Board of the International OCD Foundation, and co-founded their Diversity Council. Her work has been featured in several major media outlets, including NPR, Huffington Post, and the New York Times.
Joshua Falcon, PhD
Board Member
Joshua Falcon is a professor of anthropology and college writing at Florida International University (FIU) and the State University of New York (SUNY). His research lies at the intersection of psychedelics, subjectivity, and politics, as his work focuses on the non-clinical and non-traditional use of psilocybin mushrooms in the United States. His dissertation research examined how psilocybin mushrooms are used as ‘technologies of the self’, or practices aimed at changing one’s subjectivity, as well as how the nature of psychedelic drugs shifts across sociohistorical, political, and cultural contexts using the concept of ‘psychedelic assemblages’. In previous publications, he has brought the subject of psychedelics into conversation with debates on the war on drugs, biopolitics, human-environment relations, and design. Josh was the founding president of the Psychedelic Research Group at FIU, has written for the Psychedelic Science Review (PSR) website, and will be teaching a Psychedelic Lifeworlds course in the Fall of 2023.
Stacey B. Armstrong, PhD
Board Member
Dr. Stacey B. Armstrong is a senior researcher and psychologist at the Center for Psychedelic Drug Research and Education (CPDRE) at The Ohio State University College of Social Work. She earned her Ph.D. at Bowling Green State University after completing a clinical internship at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, MI. Her clinical fellowship at the Traumatic Stress Center in Akron, OH, emphasized the utilization of evidence-based treatments for posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) among veterans and civilians, including cognitive processing therapy (CPT) and prolonged exposure (PE). She also completed a research fellowship at The Ohio State University evaluating the safety and efficacy of psilocybin, a novel investigational psychedelic drug, in treating treatment-resistant PTSD among US military veterans. In addition to her work with PTSD, Dr. Armstrong is also collaborating on a clinical trial investigating the safety and efficacy of psilocybin in treating depression among lung cancer patients. She is also investigating the patterns of use and acute subjective effects of psychoactive substances in clinical and non-clinical settings, measuring the attitudes and beliefs about psychedelic-assisted therapies among mental health professionals, and helping to develop a global registry for opioid use disorder patients who have sought psychedelic therapy in international locations to obtain real-world evidence on the safety and effectiveness of ibogaine as an addiction treatment. She has a particular interest in the subjective effects of psychedelics and their impact on treatment outcomes, as well as how psychedelic-assisted therapies might benefit populations currently excluded from clinical trials.
Ana Flecha
Board Member
Ana Flecha is a PhD candidate at the University of California, Santa Cruz in the Latin American and Latinx Studies department. Her dissertation research is focused on the Santo Daime bailado, a dance central to this Amazonian ayahuasca religious practice of Brazil. She analyzes the bailado as a form of corporeal knowledge and ayahuasca pedagogy asking what this dance choreographs and what are the experiences of daimistas who practice this dance regularly. She is also interested in Brazilian popular culture, especially dance practices from the North and Northeast of Brazil, the knowledge these dances produce and share, and the kinesthetic force of danced political activism. Through her research on the Santo Daime bailado, Ana is developing the interdisciplinary concept of corpo/realization, acknowledging self-movement as the source of all knowledge, and bringing the field of postmodern dance studies to psychedelic science. She works to diversify and expand the field of psychedelic science beyond Western medical perspectives by focusing on the epistemological richness of lifestyles integrating relationships with plant spirit medicines and the communities they foster.
Olivia Marcus
Board Member
Dr. Olivia Marcus is currently a postdoctoral fellow in the NIDA-sponsored Behavioral Sciences Training program at New York University. She completed a Master's in Public Health in Sociomedical Sciences at Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health, and a PhD in Medical Anthropology at the University of Connecticut. She received a Fulbright-Hays scholarship to conduct extensive fieldwork in the upper Peruvian Amazon investigating perceptions of mental health and wellbeing among locals and foreigners who engage with globalized vegetalista practices. During her fieldwork, she became involved in the Ayahuasca Treatment Outcome Project, a naturalistic program evaluation of an addiction recovery clinic in Peru that integrates psychotherapy with vegetalista practices and other modalities to assist recovery. She is interested in therapeutic pluralism, intercultural healthcare, health-seeking behaviors, and the design and evaluation of complex, community-based interventions for mental health and substance use health. Dr. Marcus was in the first cohort of SRF awardees and strongly believes in the role of lifelong mentorship for training new researchers.
Zarmeen Zahid
Board Member
Zarmeen Zahid is currently a PhD candidate at the University of Wisconsin Madison in the labs of Dr. Matthew Banks and Dr. Cody Wenthur. She works to uncover the therapeutic mechanism of action of serotonergic psychedelics in the treatment of stress induced disorders. Though she now works in psychedelic neuroscience, she comes from a developmental psychopathology background in which she studied suicidal ideation and non-suicidal self-injury in young adults. This has made her acutely passionate about making a tangible difference in the lives of those suffering from psychiatric conditions and using psychedelics as novel treatments to do so. Zarmeen also understands the importance of diversity in perspective and science accessibility for all and is co-founder of the multi-media platform “Psychedelic Brain Science”. This platform has a mission to make psychedelic science, policy, history, and culture accessible and understandable for all individuals. Upon graduation, Zarmeen will join the Center for Psychedelics and Consciousness Research at Johns Hopkins as a Post-Doctoral Fellow.
Leia Friedwoman, M.S.
Board member
Leia Friedwoman, M.S. loves to connect the dots as an educator, writer, and agent of healing. She earned her master's degree in Clinical Psychology in 2013 and worked as an in-home therapist before psychedelics turned her world inside out. Leia approaches healing work through a lens of social and environmental justice, utilizing relational, trauma-informed and somatic frameworks to support people as they grow and move into themselves. Her activist work in the psychedelic space has spanned community harm reduction, decriminalization advocacy, survivor support, and responses to harm rooted in transformative justice. She hosts a podcast called The Psychedologist: consciousness positive radio.
Victor Pablo Acero, PhD
Board Member
Victor Pablo Acero, PhD, is a Postdoctoral Scholar and Manager of Operations and Strategy at the Center for Psychedelic Drug Research and Education (CPDRE) at Ohio State University, where his research focuses on psychedelic therapies for recovery from traumatic brain injury and psychedelic-assisted therapy interventions in veteran populations. He co-founded and serves as Associate Director of the Penn Psychedelics Collaborative (PPC), a transdisciplinary consortium of faculty, researchers, and clinicians at UPenn. He also co-founded and serves as an Organizer for the PhilaDelic Conference, the PPC's flagship initiative. He also co-founded the Intercollegiate Psychedelics Network, a non-profit empowering, developing, and connecting the next generation of students & rising professionals in the psychedelic ecosystem, and sits on the Board of Directors for the Source Research Foundation. Additionally, Victor is pioneering the Our Psychedelics initiative, which explores the intersection of organized labor and equitable access to psychedelic medicine.
Emeritus Directors
Joseph Barsuglia
Lauren Padgett
Mariana M. Cajaiba, MD.
Kathleen A. Davis
Andrew Quigley
Kwasi Adusei
