Our Team

We're a team of researchers, journalists, producers, and harm reductionists who have been covering psychedelics and drug policy for more than a decade. We study psychedelic science and culture, investigate the pharmaceutical industry that captured both, and bring that work to the public through reports and podcasts.

Team portraits were hand drawn by Psymposia's Russell Hausfeld.

Brian Normand

Brian Normand is a co-founder of Psymposia and its editor and producer. Since 2014 he has produced dozens of events and conversations with leading figures in psychedelics and drug policy in the United States, Mexico, and Europe. He holds a BS in Plant, Soil, and Insect Science from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where he helped organize the campus's first psychedelics conference. His work focuses on drug prohibition in the United States and Latin America and the impact of corporations on psychedelia.

Neşe Devenot, PhD

Neşe Devenot, PhD (they/them) is a Senior Lecturer in the University Writing Program at Johns Hopkins University, where they conduct interdisciplinary research across the fields of medical humanities, psychedelic studies, bioethics, harm reduction, poetics, and comparative literature. They are a board member at Psymposia, a psychedelic harm reduction nonprofit, and they were previously an affiliated researcher with the Project on Psychedelics Law and Regulation (POPLAR) at the Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics at Harvard Law School. A psychedelic humanities researcher since 2010, Devenot helped establish Psychedelic Studies as an interdisciplinary field by articulating the necessity of humanities frameworks for understanding psychedelic experiences. Since then, they have developed critiques of pseudoscientific justifications for therapeutic touch in psychedelic-assisted therapy and of corporate capture in the psychedelic industry.

Brian Pace, PhD

Brian Pace, PhD is Politics and Ecology Editor at Psymposia. He launched Psychedelic Studies at The Ohio State University with his course and as a former Affiliate Scholar of its Center for Psychedelic Drug Research and Education. Trained as an evolutionary ecologist with field work in southern Mexico, the US prairie, and the Ecuadorian Amazon, his research examines how psychedelic experiences interact with ideology and the politics of the psychedelic renaissance. He co-organized the 2022 Psychedemia conference and co-authored a citizen petition to the FDA on MDMA-assisted therapy.

Russell Hausfeld

Russell Hausfeld is Psymposia’s Senior Investigative Reporter, Illustrator and Video Editor, and former curator of Truthdig’s investigative series The Ecstasy of Agony on the military and the psychedelic industry. He holds a BA in Journalism and Religious Studies from the University of Cincinnati; his reporting has been cited in Vice, The Nation, Frontiers in Psychology, Cover Story: Power Trip, the Daily Beast, and Harm Reduction Journal.

Mike Elliott

Mike Elliott is a senior software engineer with fifteen years' experience; founder of Elliodelics, a consultancy at the intersection of technology and psychedelics; and Executive Director of The Consciousness Library (Mindscape Collective, a Utah 501(c)(3) that aggregates psychedelic research). He holds an MA in Psychedelics and Consciousness Studies from the University of Ottawa (2026) and is first author of a 2026 letter in JAMA Psychiatry.

James Gordon Curtis

James Gordon Curtis is a journalist, podcast producer, and harm-reduction worker and activist from Flint, Michigan. His writing ranges from the personal to the educational and centers on reducing the harms of prohibition. He produces, co-hosts, edits, and mixes The Psymposia Podcast and was a contributing author on The Psychedelic Syndicate.