After reading Oliver Sack’s book Musicophilia when she was 16 years old, Avery Ostrand stayed up all night to learn about reward pathways in the brain. She was hooked, driven to answer the question: How could music give us access to the brain in new ways? 

Ostrand would go on to study biopsychology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, hoping to work on music in the brain. After graduating, she saw the work that Ted Zanto was doing at Neuroscape to study rhythm and the brain and decided to move to San Francisco to try to intern at the Center. “I pretty much just persistently emailed Ted until he responded,” she recalls. Ostrand interned for more than a year with Zanto, working on studies on rhythm and tACS brain stimulation until she was hired full time. 

Now an Assistant Clinical Research Coordinator at Neuroscape, Ostrand is coordinating psilocybin research in the Psychedelics Division, as well as remote clinical trials using the online platform Nexus. A recent high point for Ostrand was running the MRIs for a CNN special on magic mushrooms. Ostrand scanned the brain of the CNN correspondent before and after he went to a psilocybin retreat in Jamaica. “That was a really unique experience and not an opportunity that happens at most labs,” she says.

When Eric Steinberg was 16 years old, he read Michael Pollen’s book How to Change Your Mind. It lit a fire under him to better understand psychedelic science. Now a rising junior at Emory University volunteering at Neuroscape this summer, he gets to work with psychedelics researchers everyday. 

“To actually be working at a place that is helping to contribute to this research never ceases to be the coolest thing ever for me whenever I step into the Mission Bay campus,” he says. “I am getting to work regularly with legendary figures and institutions in the psychedelic research world that I’ve known about for years–it’s all quite surreal, in the best possible way.”

Steinberg is volunteering with Lorenzo Pasquini, PhD, an assistant professor at the Weill Institute for Neurosciences, as well as Tyler Toueg, a PhD student at Berkeley, researching how psychedelic experiences with psilocybin and LSD can create long-lasting changes to gene expressions in animals and, ideally, in humans. He has enjoyed deepening his neuroscience knowledge set, whether through research review, reading articles with peers, attending presentations, and casual conversations around campus. But it has been the rich and varied interactions with others that will stick the most in his memories.