UNITy wins UCL Global Engagement Fund to research the neurobiology of psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy in Brazil!

Written By Rosalind McAlpine

UNITy has been awarded the UCL Global Engagement Fund to support an upcoming, collaborative project based in Brazil. Our team will be investigating ’Neurobiological biomarkers of improved wellbeing and mental health following psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy’. Our team will be collaborating with Eduardo Schenberg.

Eduardo Schenberg, PhD, charted a solid academic path in the interface between psychology, psychiatry and neurosciences. He has a degree in biomedicine and a masters in psychopharmacology from UNIFESP (Federal University of São Paulo), as well as a PhD in neurosciences from USP (University of São Paulo). Following his prize-winning post-doctoral research at UNIFESP and Imperial College, London, he began work to develop new psychiatric treatments. Throughout his degrees he specialized in the study of psychoactive drugs and their varied effects - both harmful and therapeutic - with a focus on psychedelic substances (including ayahuasca, LSD, ibogaine, MDMA and psilocybin). He ran and participated in leading studies on the effects of these substances on the human mind and brain, including an ayahuasca EEG study (more than 80 citations) and the first neuroimaging study on the effects of LSD in humans (published in 2016 and already counting over 500 scientific citations). Since then he has been investigating the scientific bases of the effects of these substances on human consciousness, as well as some promising potential therapeutic applications for conditions such as PTSD, depression and chemical dependencies, among others. In 2018 he published a scientific article on this subject in Frontiers in Pharmacology, which has been viewed over 80,000 times and sits at the top 1% most downloaded and 8% most cited articles of the whole Frontiers journal series. In 2015-16, he coordinated the first Brazilian study on the therapeutic use of MDMA in psychotherapy sessions for the treatment of severe PTSD (post-traumatic stress syndrome) in partnership with MAPS, with the approval of CONEP (Brazilian National Ethics Committee) and ANVISA (The Brazilian Health Regulatory Agency), the results of which were published in 2020 in the Brazilian Journal of Psychiatry and widely reported in several media, including Folha de São Paulo (newspaper), BBC Brasil and Globo (TV). In 2019, he was recognized as one of eight Brazilians transforming the country (Trip Transformers). He has done numerous press interviews and runs online courses which have been taken by over 10,000 students. He is founder and President of the Phaneros Institute, a Brazilian non-profit pioneering clinical research on Psychedelic-Assisted Psychotherapy (PAP) and training for health professionals, with over 800 registered students.

Rosalind McAlpine
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