Mike Jay is an author and historian who has written widely on the history of science and medicine, particularly on the mind, consciousness and psychoactive drugs. His books include High Society: Mind-Altering Drugs in History and Culture (2010), Mescaline: A Global History of the First Psychedelic (2019), and Psychonauts: Drugs and the Making of the Modern Mind (2023).

Alison is an ecologist and professional environmental photographer who has worked with fungi for three decades. She is actively involved in teaching, research and conservation, but is mostly in the undergrowth among fungi.

Neil Logan is a researcher, educator, and land steward specialising in medicinal and entheogenic plants, with a focus on taxonomic enigmas and ethnobotanical mysteries. Drawing inspiration from the cultural and ecological wisdom shared with him through decades of research and travel,

Graham St John, PhD, is a vibeologist specialising in the anthropology of transformational events, movements, and figures. Strange Attractor: The Hallucinatory Life of Terence McKenna (MIT Press) is the latest among his books, which include Mystery School in Hyperspace: A Cultural History of DMT, Global Tribe: Technology, Spirituality and Psytrance, and FreeNRG: Notes from the Edge of the Dancefloor (Commonground, 2001).

Scott is an author, academic, teacher, student of the “Ageless Wisdom”, storyteller, scientist, founding director of the Cetacean Studies Institute, expert on Dolphin-Assisted Therapy, Permaculture designer and teacher, alternative architecture builder, lightshow artist, workshop leader, lifelong animal lover and activist, father, ex-pat American now proudly Australian citizen, and psychonaut.

Mark Pesce co-invented the technology for 3D on the Web - laying the foundations for the metaverse - has written ten books, including "Getting Started with ChatGPT and AI Chatbots", was for seven years a judge on the ABC's hit series The New Inventors, founded postgraduate programs at the University of Southern California and the Australian Film Television and Radio School, holds an honorary appointment at Sydney University, is a multiple-award-winning columnist for The Register, writes features for COSMOS Magazine, and is professional futurist and public speaker. Pesce hosts the award-winning 'The Next Billion Seconds' podcast, and recently released the highly-praised, award-nominated series “A Brief History of the Metaverse”.

Harry Pack is a multidisciplinary artist whose work explores altered states of consciousness, expanded perception, and the subtle architecture of the mind. Through a dynamic practice encompassing painting, illustration, and digital media, he investigates the intersection between psychedelic experience and the inner psychological landscape, using art as a vehicle to explore reality.

Anya has a motley background and broad research interests combining nature conservation, ethnobotany, neuroscience and psychiatry, interweaving and connecting these diverse paths through psychedelic science. Deep love for nature and wildlife has motivated Anya to study biology at the University of Edinburgh, while a quest to understand altered states of consciousness has prompted her to specialise in neuroscience and later continued during her PhD in psychiatry at Cambridge, where she investigated the origins of psychosis.

It is an exciting time for psychedelic healing in Aotearoa New Zealand, with the first clinic for psilocybin-assisted therapy opening its doors in May 2025 and a first round of government guidance on how to apply to set up psychedelic clinics released in July 2025. There is also a growing call for Māori to be able to access endemic psychedelic mushrooms outside of controlled substances legislation.

Anna-Leigh Hodge is a Māori (Te Rarawa, Ngātiwai) and English/French Kiwi. She is a Registered Health Psychologist, a PhD Candidate in the School of Pharmacy, Faculty of Medical and Health Sciences, and a member of the Auckland Neuropsychopharmacology Research Group at the University of Auckland.

David Nickles is an underground researcher, harm reduction advocate, and journalist. He’s Creator and Producer of New York magazine’s Cover Story: Power Trip podcast. As a forerunner of Critical Psychedelic Studies, his work has focused on the intersection of radical politics and the sociocultural implications of psychoactive substances, research and clinical ethics, and novel phytochemical analysis of psychoactive materials.

James W. Sanders is a psychologist, cognitive neuroscientist, and micro-phenomenologist studying the neurophenomenology of short-acting tryptamines and other psychedelics at the UCL Centre for Consciousness Research and the Centre for Psychedelic Research, Imperial College London.

Ethnobotanist and herbal medicine expert Dr GPS Jhala has dedicated more than 25 years to promoting traditional herbal medicine and training generations of locals in the wisdom of Indigenous herbs for environmental sustainability and affordable healthcare.

Sam Lasham

I am a PhD candidate at the University of Auckland where I am investigating harm reduction and drug checking in the context of psilocybin mushrooms. Prior to moving to pharmacology, I received a BSc and Postgraduate Diploma in Genetics, and a Master’s in Botany from Otago University, where most of my research centred around the investigation of native New Zealand fungi.

Alex K. Gearin (PhD) is a cultural anthropologist specialising in the intersections of mental health, neo-shamanism, and psychedelics. Much of his research has focused on ayahuasca, including for his recent book Global Ayahuasca: Wondrous Visions and Modern Worlds (Stanford University Press, 2024). The book explores how the emotional and sensory dimensions of ayahuasca practices intersect with modernity and globalisation, based on ethnographic research on the ground in Australia, Peru, and China.

Kayla Greenstien is a PhD Candidate at the University of Sydney, researching the use of touch and theoretical underpinnings of psychedelic-assisted therapies.

Mohammed Reza Mirzadeh has come from a horticulture background. He spent almost all his working life (over thirty years) in the mushroom industry, mainly in Iran and Australia, holding positions in production, QA, and farm management. In the last twenty years, parallel to his positions within the industry, he has been conducting workshops and mushroom courses discussing compost/substrate production and growing methods for Agaricus and various Oyster mushrooms.