RICK STRASSMAN M.D. holds degrees from Stanford University and Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University. He took his internship and general psychiatry residency at the University of California, Davis, Medical Center in Sacramento and he spent ten years as a tenured professor at the University of Mexico he performed the first new human studies with psychedelic drugs in the US in over 20 years. His research involved the powerful naturally-occurring compound, DMT – N,N-dimethyltryptamine. Led to this substance through his earlier study of the pineal gland as a potential biological locus for spiritual experiences, he administered several hundred doses of DMT to approximately 60 volunteers between 1990 and 1995. He wrote about this research in the popular book, DMT: The Spirit Molecule, which has sold over 100,000 copies, has been translated into 12 languages, and is now available as an audio-book. It also inspired an independent documentary by the same name, picked up by Warner Bros distributing in Fall, 2011. With three distinguished collaborators, he co-authored Inner Paths to Outer Space, which looks more carefully at the common “other worlds” experience that volunteers frequently reported during his research. Rick Strassman was born in Los Angeles, California in 1952. He attended public schools in southern California’s San Fernando Valley, and graduated from Ulysses S. Grant High School in Van Nuys in 1969. As an undergraduate, he majored in zoology at Pomona College in Claremont California for two years before transferring to Stanford University, where he graduated with departmental honors in biological sciences in 1973. During summers in college he worked for RedKen Laboratories, developing cosmetics and a line of hair dyes, and also performed laboratory research at Stanford, on the development of the chicken embryo’s nervous system. He attended the Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University in the Bronx, New York, where he obtained his medical degree with honors in 1977. Dr. Strassman took his internship and general psychiatry residency at the University of California, Davis, Medical Center in Sacramento, and received the Sandoz Award for outstanding graduating resident in 1981. After graduating, he worked for a year in Fairbanks, Alaska in community mental health and private psychiatric practice. From 1982-1983, he obtained fellowship training in clinical psychopharmacology research at the University of California, San Diego’s Veteran’s Administration Medical Center. He then served on the clinical faculty in the department of psychiatry at UC Davis Medical Center, before taking a full-time academic position in the department of psychiatry at the University of New Mexico School of Medicine in Albuquerque in 1984. At UNM, Dr. Strassman performed clinical research investigating the function of the pineal hormone melatonin in which his research group documented the first known role of melatonin in humans. He also began the first new US government approved and funded clinical research with psychedelic drugs in over twenty years. Before leaving the University in 1995,