My Longer Scientific Journey

Psychedelic Research

Predicting the Psychedelic Experience (with Imperial College London)

I have worked in psychedelic research since I began attending lab meetings for the Imperial College Centre for Psychedelic Research in the summer of 2021. My first project was the validation of the Imperial Psychedelic Predictor Scale, which predicts the type of experience someone will have based on how they feel just before consuming the psychedelic (Angyus et al., 2024, Psychological Medicine). This project opened my eyes to the various factors which contribute to the nature of the psychedelic experience. While we’re a long way from knowing exactly how to optimize the context in which psychedelics are taken, scientists are working hard to collect evidence for the safest ways to use psychedelics. This evidence has already transformed public perception and informed public policy changes around the use of psychedelics. Converting the ancient and anecdotal wisdom around psychedelic usage into scientific literature will drive the careful and respected integration of these substances into modern society.

Brain Entropy and Psychedelics (with Imperial College London)

My second project was focused on brain entropy, a prominent concept in psychedelics and consciousness research popularized by Dr. Robin Carhart-Harris at Imperial College London. I was drawn to these theories because they aligned with the perspective of biology which I developed during my undergraduate years in chemical and biological engineering at Montana State University (see below for the longer story of my undergraduate career). The second law of thermodynamics says that the universe moves toward disorder, yet all biological life can be viewed as an organized structure which maintains itself throughout and beyond a lifetime through survival and reproduction. The brain exists to augment this effort, and thus aims to find the most stable and irrefutable understanding of the universe possible. One of the most reproduced findings in psychedelic brain imaging is that psychedelics increase the complexity of neural activity through desynchronization of regular patterns of activity. This dissolution of structure is hard to ignore when consistently accompanied by a simultaneous dissolution of mind. Naturally, many researchers, myself included, have become interested in testing this relationship further. This project taught me that we are a long way from understanding how the brain relates to mind, especially when it comes to something so indescribable as the psychedelic experience. However, I also learned that there is a fast-growing and powerful relationship between brains and computers. A massive fleet of analytical tools are being engineered every day to take new mathematical angles on the wealth of data that comes out of a single brain scan. We are living in an exciting time to be studying the relationship between brain and mind, and psychedelic research is contributing significantly to that noble pursuit.

A New Approach to Research (with Psynautics and Psychedelic Neuroscience)

After several years immersed in psychedelic research—developing the Psychedelic Predictor Scale, investigating brain entropy, and presenting at conferences around the world—I began to reflect on how I could contribute more directly to the public’s understanding of this vibrant and rapidly evolving field. Since my undergraduate years, I’ve envisioned building a curious and connected community through public education and open dialogue. That vision came into sharper focus when I met Dr. Conor Murray, a UCLA researcher and founder of Psynautics. His work showed me what’s possible when cutting-edge neuroscience meets citizen science.

Psynautics is pioneering the largest brain study on the effects of psychedelics to date, leveraging accessible EEG technology to make neuroscience scalable. But the mission goes beyond data collection. Psynautics is building a platform where individuals not only contribute to research but learn from it—receiving personalized brain insights, engaging in community dialogue, and even voting on future research questions. It’s a radical reimagining of science as something open, collaborative, and deeply human. This is exactly the kind of initiative Psychedelic Neuroscience was made to support: a bridge between rigorous research and meaningful public involvement, creating a new culture of scientific exploration at the intersection of brain, mind, and soul.

To bring this vision to life, Psychedelic Neuroscience and Psynautics have formed a partnership rooted in shared values of curiosity, creativity, and collective discovery. At the heart of this collaboration is a generative art project that turns brainwave data into vivid mandalas—unique visual fingerprints of altered states, insight, and transformation. Powered by Psychedelic Neuroscience and boosted by Psynautics brain recording abilities, this project invites participants to witness their own mind as art. Each piece is not just beautiful—it’s personal, scientific, and alive with meaning. These artworks are available as high-quality prints, wearable designs, and other keepsakes, allowing individuals to carry a piece of their psychedelic journey into the world and share in their wonder like never before. Psychedelic Neuroscience also boosts Psynautics by helping cultivate an engaged research community, translating scientific insights into language that’s both rigorous and relatable. This partnership represents a new model: where science meets soul, and where the boundary between researcher and participant dissolves into a shared canvas of exploration.

Join us. Explore the art, learn the science behind it, and become part of a growing movement to democratize psychedelic research. Whether you’re here for the beauty, the insight, or the community—we’ve saved you a seat at the frontier.

Undergraduate Work

To expand on the meandering academic journey which ultimately drove me into the neuroscience of psychedelics, I would like to also discuss my undergraduate career and trajectory of interests. IB Physics was my favorite subject in highschool, and I would have minored in it in college if it weren’t for a lack of magic in the teaching style in the physics department I experienced in my first year. I became more interested in studying the living creatures that existed within the physical world, and in particular where the boundary was between what was considered “alive”.

This question was something of interest to me since the 6th grade, when my science teacher had us write an essay on whether fire was alive. He set us up by talking about reproduction, growth, consumption, waste, energy, and other characteristics of life which were shared by fire. I argued that fire could indeed be considered alive, citing all of the ways in which it was similar to life. He responded by saying fire is not alive and giving me a C. It was my very first letter grade at school and so naturally this experience stuck with me.

I decided to minor in microbiology to pursue this mysterious boundary between living creatures and dead matter because the organisms of microbiology proved to be simple enough that it was easy to see how the random molecular stumblings of statistical mechanics organize into the living being. I developed this appreciation during my 3 years of undergraduate research in Dr. Blake Wiedenheft’s lab, who I was drawn to after he lectured in my biological engineering class on genetic engineering and CRISPR. As the first researcher to work on CRISPR in Jennifer Doudna’s lab at UC Berkeley, Blake was a major contributor to the development of this revolutionary genetic engineering technology. His passion for the wonders of microbiological “genetic warfare” was contagious, and I ended up combining this with my interest in energy to work on isolating microalgae for biofuel production as well as search for the unique class of viruses which infect microalgae.

My understanding of the distinction between living and dead matter was slightly improved during my class on thermodynamics for biological engineers. In a group presentation my senior year, I was assigned to speak on a chapter focused on the thermodynamics of biological life. The second law of thermodynamics states that all things in the universe tend toward disorder. In other words, entropy is always increasing. The unique thing about biological life is that it actively preserves its structure, never violating the second law of thermodynamics itself because it creates disorder (through the conversion of food into waste) and borrows the released energy to maintain itself. While this established a more concrete definition, I still found myself perplexed by how feeble the human description of our universe was. Contradictions existed everywhere in our understanding of the world, yet we continued to pursue classification and structure in an eternal effort to produce a better map. Why?

As a developing practitioner of Zen meditation, I was fascinated by the limitations of the mind in what appeared to be an inherently descriptionless world. When the COVID pandemic put a pause on my research and studies, I spent time widening my scope of reading and reflecting on my interests. I found that my most joyfully curious moments came when reading about neuroscientific explanations of my conscious experience. With a simultaneous exposure to the collective depression and anxiety which was driven by isolation of quarantine, I felt that the most foundational technology we could develop would be the understanding of brain and mind. Psychedelics, which initially stimulated our interest in the serotonin system and thus traditional antidepressants, were making a resurgence through modern clinical trials treating depression and other ailments. I had personally seen psychedelics make powerful and lasting change, and I also saw them as a tool to investigate the most fundamental drivers of human behavior. I wanted to study psychedelics so I could understand how the brain and mind find meaning in a world which is so contradictory. Why do we keep building a map of a world which could never be mapped?

I found fascination with Karl Friston’s Free Energy Principle because it brought the thermodynamic perspective of biological life I had learned about and extended to the computational organization of the brain.

Energy Engineering Work

My understanting of the position of human life in the thermodynamic universe deepened my respect for the value of energy. Energy is the source from which we maintain all that is considered alive through our consumption of it to maintain organization over time. Organisms exist in a harmonious pursuit of organized structure, sustaining specific arrangements of matter as genetic material and the flesh that surrounds it. This pursuit is harmonized with the second law of thermodynamics which always drives the world towards entropy, disorder, and chaos. The interface of this harmonization is energy, birthed by a transition of matter towards disorder in accordance with the second law of thermodynamics, and utilized by life to drive its own increase in order. All life on earth is pursuing this harmonious relationship with entropy through energy. I believe it is the reason we see beauty in the varioius organisms that thrive around us. While humans have done spectacular things to most effectively protect their structures, it is important for us to apply our structure seeking brains to bring the entire collective of life on earth upward in the harmonious dance against entropy.

Energy cannot be created or destroyed and we are subsisting primarily on relatively unrenewable sources of it which inevitably produce biproducts which affect the environment in a way which contradicts our own interests. In light of this, I have been driven to contribute to solutions for the energy problem of our era, because energy is what makes up the universe, ourselves, and is the essential resource in our pursuit of maintained order over time.

My early focus was in the isolation of new strains of microalgae for biofuel production, as well as an understanding of their viruses so that we could protect our algal cultures as well as understand more about either creature through the study of their genetic conflict (it is at the interface of virus and organism, where we have rapid iteration of evolving genomes and intense selective force from the perils of infection, that the most artful and elegant of molecular machines are generated - such as the CRISPR Cas9 protein which was repurposed for gene editing).

My other time in the energy sector has been working for KeyLogic, a government contractor which supports the National Energy Technology Laboratory. This work focuses on analysis and reviews of government funded energy technologies. My work has covered topics ranging from electrolysis for hydrogen production, microalgae for biofuel, gasification of municipal waste for energy production, carbon capture utilization and sequestration, and meeting the increasing energy demand for datacenters across the nation. My work for KeyLogic and the NETL have allowed me a valuable and sober perspective on the energy challenges of the United States and the world more broadly. I also feel priveledged to be embedded in a community so different from that of the psychedelic world. It’s more important than ever that we find opportunities to be a bridge between the distant communities of our modern society. I’m proud to be influenced by a diverse set of teachers and communities, and I cannot more strongly encourage the same for others.