David E. Nichols

David E. Nichols, PhD, currently an Adjunct Professor at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, NC, is a Distinguished Professor Emeritus at the Purdue University College of Pharmacy and was the Robert C. and Charlotte P. Anderson Distinguished Chair in Pharmacology, where he taught and did research for 38 years. In 2004 he was named the Irvine H. Page Lecturer by the International Society for Serotonin Research, received the first Purdue Provost’s Outstanding Graduate Mentor award in 2006 and was named a Distinguished Alumnus by the University of Iowa College of Pharmacy in 2012. He began studying psychedelics as a graduate student in 1969 and has been studying them continuously since then. His lab synthesized the MDMA for MAPS Phase I and II clinical trials, the DMT for Dr. Rick Strassman, and the psilocybin used for human clinical studies conducted at Johns Hopkins University. In 1993 he founded the Heffter Research Institute (HRI), which funded the first groundbreaking Phase I and II studies of psilocybin for the treatment of depression in cancer patients at New York University and Johns Hopkins University, as well as pilot studies for treating alcohol use disorder, and tobacco addiction. He has published more than 350 peer-reviewed scientific articles and book chapters. He has been a featured speaker at numerous international conferences and is considered the world’s leading expert on the chemistry of psychedelics. He also served as an expert on medicinal chemistry and pharmacology in consultancies for various pharmaceutical companies and has been an expert for the defense on legal cases involving psychedelic drugs.