Charles Nichols, PhD

Dr. Nichols currently is a professor of pharmacology at Louisiana State University Health Sciences Center in New Orleans, LA. He earned his B.S. at Purdue University, his Ph.D. at Carnegie Mellon University, and performed his postdoctoral work at Vanderbilt University School of Medicine in the Department of Pharmacology researching. He has been studying the cellular, molecular, genetic, and behavioral effects of psychedelics for over 25 years. He is a founding member of the International Society for Research on Psychedelics and its President-Elect, a councilor for the International Society for Serotonin Research, and Co-Editor in Chief of Psychedelic Medicine. Key discoveries he has made include elucidation of the effects of psychedelics on gene expression in the brain, identification and characterization of the specific cells in the brain that directly respond to psychedelics, and the development of new rodent and fruit fly experimental systems recapitulating the long-lasting antidepressant-like effects of psilocybin for mechanistic study. Dr. Nichols has also discovered that psychedelics are extremely potent anti-inflammatory agents, and can have full efficacy at levels far below those necessary to induce behavioral effects in several models of inflammatory diseases.