Dennis McKenna Author

Dennis McKenna is an ethnopharmacologist who has studied plant hallucinogens for over forty years. He is the author of many scientific papers, and co-author, with his brother Terence McKenna, of The Invisible Landscape: Mind, Hallucinogens, and the I Ching, and Psilocybin: Magic Mushroom Grower’s Guide. He holds a doctorate from the University of British Columbia, where his research focused on ayahuasca and oo-koo-hé, two hallucinogens used by indigenous peoples in the Northwest Amazon. He received post-doctoral research fellowships in the Laboratory of Clinical Pharmacology, National Institute of Mental Health, and in the Department of Neurology, Stanford University School of Medicine. Dennis has been an adjunct assistant professor at the Center for Spirituality and Healing at the University of Minnesota since 2001, where he teaches courses in ethnopharmacology and botanical medicine. He has taught summer field courses in Peru and Ecuador, and has conducted fieldwork throughout the upper Amazon.  He is a founding board member of the Heffter Research Institute, a non-profit organization focused on the investigation of the potential therapeutic uses of psychedelic medicines.  Dennis McKenna is the editor of Ethnopharmacologic Search for Psychoactive Drugs (Vol. 1 & 2): 50 Years of Research, published by Synergetic Press in 2018. Bruce Frederick Damer, PhD is Canadian-American multi disciplinary scientist, designer, and author. Dr. Bruce Damer collaborates with colleagues developing and testing a new model for the origin of life on Earth and in the design of spacecraft architectures to provide a viable path for expansion of human civilization beyond the Earth.  He began his career in the 1980s developing some of the earliest user interfaces for personal computers, led a community in the 1990s bringing the first multi-user virtual worlds to the Internet, and since 2000 supported NASA and the space industry on numerous simulations and spacecraft designs.  He has spent 25 years chronicling the history of computing in his DigiBarn Computer Museum and curates archives of counterculture figures such as Dr. Timothy Leary, Terence McKenna and others. He currently serves as Principal Scientist at DigitalSpace; Associate Researcher in the Department of Biomolecular Engineering at UC Santa Cruz; Associate of the NASA Astrobiology Center; Member of the International Society for the Study of the Origin of Life, and Founding Director of the Contact Consortium.  He received his PhD from University College, Dublin; MSEE from the University of Southern California and BSc from the University of Victoria. Luis Eduardo Luna was born in Florencia, in the Colombian Amazon region. He is both a Guggenheim fellow and Fellow of the Linnean Society of London. Luna worked with Pablo Amaringo to establish the internationally recognized USKO-AYAR Amazonian School of Painting in Pucallpa, Peru. From 1994-1998, he taught as a Professor of Anthropology in Brazil, and currently teaches as a Senior Lecturer at the Swedish School of Economics in Helsinki. He has also been an Associate of the Botanical Museum of Harvard University since 1986.