As an Artist, Thomas Haferlach merges machine learning wizardry with music and multimedia art, exploring the realms of psychedelia from artistic and scientific perspectives. He founded Voodoohop, an influential art collective celebrated by São Paulo's art scene.

Utilizing generative AI, Thomas crafts new musical expressions that blend high-tech in unexpected and glitchy ways.

Born in Germany and ripened in the rich cultural milieu of São Paulo for over a decade, Thomas’s music fuses minimalist electronics with the chaotic rhythms of Latin America and the calculated trippiness of Krautrock. His approach is a testament to the joy of creation, focusing on innovative hybrid experiences that bridge diverse cultural and technological landscapes.

Through the lens of a Business/Researcher, after studying Computer Science & Artificial Intelligence at Edinburgh University, Thomas spent 9 years in São Paulo creating an art collective, while always keeping one foot in the technology sector. Thomas conceived and implemented a variety of interactive installations, combining his passion for art, research, and technology.

After settling back in Germany, he completed a project which involved researching the future trends of Artificial Intelligence for the World Government summit. Since then he spent a few years researching and working with data-driven generative audio modeling. He built the open source platform Pollinations.AI which has the aim of making generative machine learning more accessible.

Currently Thomas is working as a senior machine learning specialist at the music AI company Pixelynx founded by Deadmau5 and Richie Hawtin.

By the time Annelise was seven years old, she had lived in Istanbul for five years and travelled around the world. By the age of twenty, she had lived in England and Spain, and had a passion for learning languages and experiencing diverse cultures. This contributed to her going to Brazil to study its culture and history, a time which profoundly influenced the rest of her life. Her professional careers have ranged from Runway Model, to Director of HR in a corporation, Author, and Death Doula for thirty years. “Ayahuasca, Sacred Medicine” shares these exciting, often wondrous, and sometimes awful experiences from her life.

In 1977, she drank Ayahuasca for the first time with a Brazilian spiritual group, the UDV (Uniao do Vegetal). She was a member for eighteen years, and served as a primary translator. Her story of rituals, the strength of community, and the years of deepening awareness portrays a tradition of mystery with ancient roots, and also a very modern drama involving stark and honest revelation. The story shares the role of Ayahuasca in opening Annelise to dimensions beyond this realm. Those expereinces led to the healing of old wounds, a significant change in the trajectory of her life, and deeper happiness in her everyday life. The book is a great repository of factual and experiential information for understanding the science and the mystery of the many aspects of Ayahuasca.

Over many years, Annelise has written articles and presented her knowledge at conferences dedicated to studying Ayahuasca. From the intimate perspective of a translator and interpreter, Annelise adventured with researchers involved in Ethnobotany and learned first hand the personal, cultural, and scientific significance of Ayahuasca in human development. Her work has contributed beautiful knowledge and personal experience to the conscious exploration of this sacred medicine. This book offers wisdom and realistic and grounded knowledge of how Ayahuasca can lead to spiritual awakening, emotional and physical healing, and the deepening of our human connection with nature.

Rebecca Lazarou’s work is an ecology of different disciplines spanning across medical science, ethnopharmacology, herbalism, holistic healthcare, cannabis and psychedelics. She is also an activist, writer, speaker and herbal formulator.

She is currently a PhD candidate at Kew Gardens and UCL School of Pharmacy with a focus on ethnopharmacology and herbal medicines. She was the science and managing editor for the ESPD55 volume, is currently co-editor for education charity Herbal Reality and founded Laz The Plant Scientist to bring quality, sustainably sourced herbal medicines and education to people.

She is passionate about democratizing knowledge, and rekindling ethnobotany and herbalism from being marginalised disciplines to part of common knowledge again.

Ultimately her aim is to help nurture our relationship with nature through natural medicines, and support our species return back to Earth centred living. She is devoted to science to demystify these topics, but equally I am committed to rekindling the magic, awe and healing we find on our precious Earth.

Wade Davis is an ethnographer, writer, photographer and filmmaker whose work has taken him from the Amazon to Tibet, Africa to Australia, Polynesia to the Arctic. An Explorer-in-Residence at the National Geographic Society from 2000 to 2013, he is currently professor of anthropology and the BC Leadership Chair in Cultures and Ecosystems at Risk at the University of British Columbia. Author of 24 books, including One River, The Wayfinders, Into the Silence, and Magdalena, he holds degrees in anthropology and biology and received his Ph.D. in ethnobotany, all from Harvard University. Primarily through the Harvard Botanical Museum, he spent over three years in the Amazon and Andes as a plant explorer, living among fifteen indigenous groups in eight Latin American nations while making some 6,000 botanical collections. A professional speaker for 30 years, Wade has spoken from the TED main stage on five occasions, delivered the CBC Massey Lectures, and lectured at 200 universities and some 250 corporations and professional associations. Davis is an Honorary Member of the Explorers Club, Honorary Vice-President of the Royal Canadian Geographical Society, a recipient of 12 honorary degrees, and a Member of the Order of Canada, among other distinctions. In 2018, he was made an Honorary Citizen of Colombia. Named by the National Geographic Society as one of the Explorers for the Millennium, he has been described as “a rare combination of scientist, scholar, poet and passionate defender of all of life’s diversity.” His latest book, Beneath the Surface of Things, became a national bestseller within days of its release by Greystone in April, 2024.

Lee Kaiser was born in Milwaukee Wisconsin in the 1980’s and is a wildlife ecologist who has lived in various communities throughout the Americas. He has worked on permaculture projects, natural building endeavors, hosting and organizing events and retreats, performing surveys for conservation investigations, agricultural and natural medicine initiatives, conducting artesanal essential oil distillation, taking part in music production, volunteering in educational workshops, and generally participating in cultural, scientific, and international exchanges. Lee met Dennis in 2016 when they both were in Minnesota, and their mutual interests in Amazonian and Andean ecology and ethnography have kept them in contact over the years. He currently lives with his partner in Argentina, and has primarily lived over the last decade in Colorado, Minnesota, Perú, and México. His travels and experiences in foreign lands as well as living with people from many different cultural backgrounds have allowed for him to dive deep into a broad range of fields and settings, while also staying plugged into some broader networks of connectivity and interdisciplinary explorations.

Dr. Bruce Damer is a scientist working in the field of Astrobiology with his passion being working on the mystery of the origin of life and where life might arise in the universe. Back at our ESPD conference in 2022 he 'came out of the psychedelic scientist closet' in his talk 'Its High Time for Science'. This talk, at which I was sitting in the front row, sparked a movement that has today led to a new organization: the Center for MINDS (Multidisciplinary Investigation into Novel Discoveries and Solutions). MINDS is modeled on MAPS and seeks to go beyond psychedelics in therapeutics and bring online practices and tools to use them to catalyze creativity, in science, tech, design and even leadership.

McKenna Academy was there at the very beginning of MINDS and I am sure we will hear about where it is today, and a bit about its deep history back to the 1950s and 60s.

Deborah has published over 40 books through her publishing house Synergetic Press, Ltd. in global ecology, regenerative agriculture, ethnobotany, psychedelics, and social justice, since establishing it in 1984. In 1986, she was on the team that designed and built a large-scale closed ecological system, Biosphere 2, developing the publications and educational programs for the complex. In 1990, she started The Biosphere Press, an imprint of the Biosphere 2 project, producing a dozen books and a classroom curriculum for children on biospheres and biomes.

While at Biosphere 2, Deborah met Richard Evans Schultes, the grandfather of contemporary ethnobotany. She went on to publish his two books of photographs he made documenting people’s use of plant medicine in the NW Colombian Amazonia. Deborah is a director and VP of the U.S. non-profit, the Institute of Ecotechnics, based in Santa Fe, New Mexico at Synergia Ranch. The Institute owns the RV Heraclitus, an 84-foot ferrocement Chinese Junk design that sailed 270,000 miles around Planet Ocean, with two years up the Amazon on an ethnobotanical expedition inspired by Schultes (1980-1982). Deborah currently lives at Synergia Ranch organic farm and retreat center where she lives, contributes to the farm operations when she can, and continues publishing books.