2021 Semi Annual Updates
Adu Matory: Unfortunately, Adu’s project could not be realized due to constraints regarding his graduation timeline and the capacity of his PI to run the study. Further, due to the pandemic, in-person conferences have been few, and travel has been relatively inaccessible, so Adu has not yet found an opportunity to use his conference travel grant.
Terence Ching: Terence is currently awaiting more data from MAPS for publication purposes.
Gabrielle Agin-Liebes: Gabrielle has completed her project and has given a talk at the Interdisciplinary Conference on Psychedelic Research, cited below. Agin-Liebes, G (2020, September). Long-term follow-up of psilocybin-assisted psychotherapy for psychiatric and existential distress in patients with life-threatening cancer. Interdisciplinary Conference on Psychedelic Research, Virtual Conference.
Benjamin Hearn: Benjamin has completed the data collection stage of his project and is currently working on analysis. He expects two publications to come from this project, the first generally being centered around descriptive statistics of counselor’s attitudes towards psychedelics while the second project will use linear regression to predict attitudes. Benjamin anticipates manuscript submission for the first publication to occur by the end of May, and the second to be completed in late August. He also has given a talk just this past month, cited below, and plans to have a roundtable discussion under review for the Association of Humanistic Counselors and expect to hear back about this within the next month. Hearn, B., Brubaker, M.,& Richardson, G. (April 2021). ‘Psychedelics & the Counseling Profession: Ethical Responsibilities and Dilemmas&’. American Counseling Association’ 2021 Annual Conference, virtual.
Thomas Varley: Thomas is in the process of collecting data. All of the materials have been purchased and he has collected a preliminary dataset to dial in the correct dose response curve. They are on target to complete data collection ideally by the end of the Spring 2021 academic year, and certainly by midsummer.
Madeline Pantoni: Madeline has completed her project and is currently in the write up stage. She has defended her dissertation and will be starting a postdoctoral position with Dr. Josh Woolley at UCSF to continue her training in psychedelic research. Madeline plans to use the remainder of her SRF Grant for the dissemination of her project (i.e., publication and conference fees) within the upcoming year. Madeline’s dissertation and defense is cited below. Pantoni, M. M. (2021). Cognitive-Behavioral Effects of Monoamine Transporter Inhibitors and Reversers [Doctoral dissertation and defense]. University of California San Diego. Pantoni, M. M., and Anagnostaras, S. G. (in prep). Looking beyond the classical psychedelics, entactogens, and stimulants in neuropsychiatry. Pantoni, M. M., Kim, J. L., Van Alstyne, K. R., and Anagnostaras, S. G. (in prep). MDMA and memory, addiction, and depression: dose-effect analysis.
Hillary (Ana) Anne Flecha: With her SRF Grant, Ana plans to travel to Mapi√° to conduct research in the Fall of 2022. She is currently focusing on her qualifying exam which is scheduled for June 1 st , 2021. Ana was just awarded a grant from the Social Sciences Research council to travel to the Northeast of Brazil this June to conduct research for one month, assuming the borders stay open. However, the situation in the Amazon region remains unsafe and she plans to be in Mapi√° during its anniversary celebration in October, but will most likely wait until next year due to the increasing presence of COVID-19 in that region. Meanwhile, she has been participating in online zoom works transmitted from Mapi√° and taking notes on those experiences. She has submitted her application for IRB approval and is awaiting their feedback.
Olivia Marcus: Olivia completed her PhD. Her papers and presentations are cited below.
'Ethnobiology of Altered States' Lecture given in 2021 for Department of Biology at Oberlin College.
'Human use of psychoactive plants: a global ethnobiological survey.' Lecture given in 2020 for an ethnobiology course at Oberlin College.
Marcus O. 'Traditionalizing global forms: ethics in vegetalista practices of the Peruvian Amazon'.
Paper presented at the 2020 Interdisciplinary Conference on Psychedelic Research in Haarlem, The Netherlands.
Marcus O. 'Ethics in mind-altering vegetalista practices of the Peruvian Amazon' Paper at the 4S/EASST 2020 conference in Prague, Czech Republic.
Jacob Green: Over the past few months Jacob has been collecting and reading digitized sources for his project. These include textbooks on the psychology of mysticism from the early 20th century, 19th century philosophy books such as T. H. Green's Prolegomena to Ethics, which would later be discussed in relationship to nitrous oxide intoxication, and accounts from newspapers and magazines of entheogenic experiences people had accidentally while under the effects of anesthesia at the dentist or while undergoing surgery. With the emergence of the COVID-19 vaccine, Jacob thinks he will be able to begin the archival portion of his research in person, allowing him to more fully explore the archives and possibly discover documents he might not have found otherwise. Luckily, Jacob feels that the COVID-19 pandemic has not affected his original plans for project completion and publication time. He plans to present a draft of a dissertation chapter based on documents he will collect under the auspices of the SRF fellowship in October at the annual Society for Social Studies of Science meeting. In 2022, he plans to synthesize the rest of those archival materials into dissertation chapters and conduct further research beyond the scope of the grant provided by the Source Research Foundation. He hopes his dissertation will be finished in the Spring of 2024. His paper he plans to present in the Fall of 2021 is cited below.
Green, J. (2021, October) "Mysticism, Mind-altering Drugs and Psychology: 1870-1919." Paper to be presented at the annual meeting of the Society for Social Studies of Science, Toronto, Canada.
Joshua Falcon: Joshua’s research project is on schedule to be completed within the originally projected time frame. He is currently in the stages of data collection (interviews, experience reports), and has already begun to code and analyze that data. He is on track to finish his interviews and data collection by the end of April 2021. Joshua is on target to complete his project in its entirety (dissertation and defense) by Spring 2022. He has completed one presentation and two publications as of April 2021. These, however, are not directly associated with his dissertation project funded by SRF. They are cited below. Psychedelics in Anthropology: Critical Theory, Decoloniality, and Design. Psychedelics in Society Seminar Series, University of Pennsylvania, March 16, 2021. Consciousness as a Domain of Extraterritoriality. Special issue of Culture, Theory and Critique (forthcoming) 2021. Situating Psychedelics and the War on Drugs within the Decolonization of Consciousness. ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographers (forthcoming) Joshua presented on his preliminary research findings at a Geography conference in April 2021, cited below. He had plans to turn this presentation paper into a full publication in the near future.
2021 Caring for the self: psychedelic experiences and the relationship between self-knowledge and health. Paper presented at Annual Meeting of the American Association of Geographers, Virtual Conference. April 7, 2021.
He also has one publication currently under review for the journal Cultural Geographies, titled: Towards a Critical Posthuman Geography.
Brandon Weiss: Brandon has completed his data collection for his project. His main personality manuscript was just accepted by Nature Scientific Reports on February 15th , 2021 and will be published with open access. A draft of an Acceptance and Commitment manuscript has been written and is still in preparation. Additionally, a draft of a narcissism manuscript is in the works. An Introduction is partially written, but additional elements have not been completed. Brandon also delivered this research to the UCSD Psychiatry Department for a selected talk as part of the Early Career JUDD symposium. Brandon’s works are cited below:
Weiss, B., Miller, J. D., Carter, N. T., & Campbell, W. K. (in press). Examining changes in personality following shamanic ceremonial use of ayahuasca. Nature Scientific Reports.
Weiss, B., Miller, J. D., Carter, N. T., & Campbell, W. K. (2021, February). Examining changes in personality following shamanic ceremonial use of ayahuasca. Oral presentation at UCSD Department of Psychiatry's 16th Annual Lewis L. Judd Young Investigators Symposium, San Diego, CA.