20 Facts About Rick Strassman

Rick Strassman is an American clinical associate professor of psychiatry at the University of New Mexico School of Medicine.

Rick Strassman has held a fellowship in clinical psychopharmacology research at the University of California San Diego and was Professor of Psychiatry for eleven years at the University of New Mexico.

Rick Strassman is the author of DMT: The Spirit Molecule, which summarizes his academic research into DMT and other experimental studies of it, and includes his own reflections and conclusions based on this research.

Rick Strassman was born in Los Angeles, California, on February 8,1952, to a Conservative Jewish family.

Rick Strassman graduated from Ulysses S Grant High School in Van Nuys in 1969.

Rick Strassman studied zoology at Pomona College in Claremont for two years before transferring to Stanford University, where he graduated with departmental honors in biological sciences in 1973.

Rick Strassman began his general psychiatry residency at the University of California, Davis, where he received the Sandoz Award for outstanding graduating resident in 1981.

Rick Strassman then served on the clinical faculty in the psychiatry department at UC Davis Medical Center, before becoming an assistant professor in the psychiatry department at the University of New Mexico School of Medicine in Albuquerque in 1984.

At UNM, Rick Strassman researched the function of the pineal gland.

Rick Strassman became clinical associate professor of psychiatry in 1991.

Rick Strassman has published over 40 peer-reviewed scientific articles on psychopharmacology, neurology, psychiatry, neuroendocrinology and neuropsychopharmacology.

Rick Strassman first developed a model of all-night suppression of melatonin by all-night bright light.

Rick Strassman then established a successful exogenous melatonin infusion protocol that replicated endogenous melatonin levels in the bright-light conditions.

From 1990 to 1995, Rick Strassman led a government-funded clinical research team at the University of New Mexico studying the effects of N, N-dimethyltryptamine, known as DMT, on human subjects in experimental conditions.

Rick Strassman was the first in 20 years to legally administer psychedelics to people in the United States, and his research has widely been regarded as kicking off the "psychedelic renaissance", in which many psychedelic compounds have begun to be scientifically studied for the first time since the early 1970s.

Rick Strassman's team published a companion article describing the psychological effects and preliminary results of a new rating scale, the Hallucinogen Rating Scale, or HRS.

Rick Strassman has conjectured that when a person is approaching death or possibly when in a dream state, the body releases a relatively large amount of DMT, mediating some of the imagery survivors of near-death experiences report.

Rick Strassman has detailed his research in his book DMT: The Spirit Molecule, and co-produced a 2010 documentary film of the same name based on this book.

Rick Strassman has conducted similar research on psilocybin, a psychedelic alkaloid found in hallucinogenic mushrooms.

Rick Strassman trained for 20 years in Zen Buddhism, received lay ordination in a Western Buddhist order, and led a meditation group of the order.