Rick Strassman graduated from Stanford University in 1973, and received his medical degree from Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University in 1977. He completed his training in general psychiatry at the University of California, Davis, Medical Center in Sacramento in 1981, and did a fellowship in clinical psychopharmacology research at the University of California, San Diego from 1982-1983. He began working in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of New Mexico School of Medicine in 1984. There, he initially performed clinical research investigating the function of the pineal hormone melatonin in which his research group documented the first known role of melatonin in humans. He then began the first new US government approved and funded clinical research with psychedelic drugs in over twenty years, focusing on the endogenous compound, DMT. He left the University in 1995, and has since practiced clinical psychiatry. He co-founded the Cottonwood Research Foundation in 2007, for which he serves as president. Dr. Strassman is currently Clinical Associate Professor of Psychiatry at UNM. He lives in northern New Mexico.

He is the author of DMT—The Spirit Molecule, which has sold over 65,000 copies since its publication in 2001, and is a co-author of Inner Paths to Outer Space, published in Spring 2008. Both were published by Inner Traditions from Rochester, Vermont. He is currently working on a book about prophecy, tentatively entitled The Soul of Prophecy: What it Is, How it Works, and Why it’s our Birthright, to be published by Inner Traditions.

His website is: www.rickstrassman.com