Rick Strassman is an American clinical associate professor of psychiatry at the University of New Mexico School of Medicine. He has held a fellowship in clinical psychopharmacology research at the University of California San Diego and was Professor of Psychiatry for eleven years at the University of New Mexico. After 20 years of intermission, Strassman was the first person in the United States to undertake human research with psychedelic, hallucinogenic, or entheogenic substances with his research on N,N-dimethyltryptamine, also known as DMT. He is also the author of DMT: The Spirit Molecule, which summarizes his academic research into DMT and other experimental studies of it, and includes his own reflections and conclusions based on this research. Life and education Strassman was born in Los Angeles, California, on February 8, 1952. He graduated from Ulysses S. Grant High School in Van Nuys in 1969. He studied zoology at Pomona College in Claremont for two years before transferring to Stanford University, where he graduated with departmental honors in biological sciences in 1973. He continued laboratory research at Stanford before attending Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University in New York, where he graduated with an M.D. with departmental honors, specializing in psychiatry. He began his general psychiatry residency at the University of California, Davis, where he received the Sandoz Award for outstanding graduating resident in 1981. From 1982 to 1983, he trained as a fellow in clinical psychopharmacology research at the University of California, San Diego. He then served on the clinical faculty in the psychiatry department at UC Davis Medical Center, before becoming an assistant professor in the psychiatry department at the University of New Mexico School of Medicine in Albuquerque in 1984. At UNM, Strassman researched the function of the pineal gland. His research group documented the first known role of melatonin in humans. He became clinical associate professor of psychiatry in 1991. He has published over 40 peer-reviewed scientific articles on psychopharmacology, neurology, psychiatry, neuroendocrinology and neuropsychopharmacology. Developmental biology research As an undergraduate at Stanford, working in the developmental biology laboratory of Norman K. Wessells, Strassman developed a new model for growing embryonic avian dorsal root ganglion neurons, suspended in a semi-solid agar matrix, thus allowing three-dimensional assessment of growing patterns. Using this model, he discovered a nonrandom pattern of growth of the leading edge of these cells. Melatonin research Strassman's interest in the human biology of altered