Taking a Trip to Improved Mental Health

Florian Brand is the co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of atai Life Sciences, a global biotech company builder with the vision of ultimately ending mental health disorders. Prior to joining atai, Florian was the Managing Director of Springlane, Germany’s leading online kitchen appliance retailer.Although Florian suffered from anxiety in his youth, he was able to achieve remission through a combination of cognitive-behavioral therapy and robust meditation practice. Nevertheless, his experiences seeing his friends and loved ones failed by the mental healthcare system inspired him to join the movement to transform the treatment landscape for patients who have been unable to find relief in currently available therapies.“We know that mental healthcare is likely the single largest unmet medical need in the world. We know that what’s out there now isn’t working. And we know that there are better options. So, let’s bridge the gap together.”

Shoshana Ungerleider, MD is the host of the TED Health Podcast, founder of endwellproject.org, a media platform to transform the end of life experience, a practicing internist at Crossover Health in San Francisco, SF Business Times 40 Under 40, writer and leading voice in healthcare who regularly appears as a medical contributor on CNN, MSNBC, CBS News with bylines in Newsweek, TIME, Scientific American, Vox and many others. She executive produced Netflix's Oscar-nominated End Game and funded Extremis. Her most recent film, Robin's Wish, is a biographical documentary about the final years of actor and comedian, Robin Williams.

Dr. Elizabeth Nielson is a psychologist with a focus on developing psychedelic medicines as empirically supported treatments for PTSD, substance use problems, and mood disorders. As a Co-founder of Fluence, she provides continuing education and training programs for therapists who wish to engage in integration of psychedelic experiences in clinical settings and designs and delivers custom education training programs for therapists working on leading psychedelic drug development studies. Dr. Nielson is a Site Co-Principal Investigator and therapist for an FDA approved Phase 3 clinical trial of MDMA-assisted Psychotherapy for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, and has served as a therapist on FDA approved clinical trials of psilocybin-assisted treatment of alcohol use disorder, psilocybin-assisted treatment of treatment resistant depression. Her research includes qualitative and mixed-methods projects designed to further understand the phenomenology and mechanisms of change in psychedelic-assisted therapy, including the experiences of trial participants and of the therapists themselves. Having completed an NIH postdoctoral fellowship at NYU, she has published and presented on topics of psychedelic therapist training, therapists’ personal experience with psychedelics, and including psychedelic integration in group and individual psychotherapy.

BIODr Ekaterina Malievskaia leads innovation at COMPASS.Ekaterina received her medical degree from St Petersburg Medical Academy in St Petersburg, Russia, and then moved to the US where she completed her Internal Medicine residency training. She worked in private practice, academic medicine and public health for more than 15 years in the greater New York area. She was a Clinical Instructor of Medicine at Mount Sinai School of Medicine, as well as a Research Professor at City University of New York.After moving to London in 2011, Ekaterina worked in global health and medical philanthropy, focusing on improving outcomes in maternal and child health. She founded COMPASS Pathways with her husband George Goldsmith in 2016, having experienced at first hand the challenges in accessing evidence-based and effective mental health care for a family member. COMPANY DESCRIPTIONCOMPASS Pathways plc (Nasdaq: CMPS) is a mental health care company dedicated to accelerating patient access to evidence-based innovation in mental health. Our focus is on improving the lives of those who are suffering with mental health challenges and who are not helped by current treatments. We are pioneering the development of a new model of psilocybin therapy, in which our proprietary formulation of synthetic psilocybin, COMP360, is administered in conjunction with psychological support.

Adriana is a Brazilian-American attorney, born and raised in São Paulo. Adriana has a J.D. from the Georgetown University Law Center, a B.A. from Brown University in Judaic Studies and International Relations, and an M.A. from Parsons The New School for Design. She began her legal career as a corporate associate on Simpson Thacher & Bartlett’s Latin American capital markets team. Adriana has since drawn on her love of contracts as an entrepreneur in the fields of contemporary culture, real estate and cannabis, as well as in her role as Senior Advisor to the Senior Deputy Chairman at the National Endowment for the Arts under President Obama. Adriana is on the board of Doctors for Cannabis Regulation. She is the author of the book Favelization: The Imaginary Brazil in Contemporary Film, Fashion and Design, originally published by the Cooper Hewitt Museum (Smithsonian Institution). She is passionate about Jewish psychedelic culture, leads the interfaith working group Faith+Psychedelics, and founded JewWhoTokes, an Instagram account that explores relationships with cannabis and psychedelics in the Jewish community.