Dennis McKenna

Dennis McKenna has for the last twenty-five years pursued the interdisciplinary study of ethnopharmacology and psychointegrator plants. He received his doctorate in 1984 from the University of British Columbia. His doctoral research focussed on ethnopharmacological investigations of the botany, chemistry, and pharmacology of ayahuasca and oo-koo-he, two orally-active tryptamine-based hallucinogens used by indigenous peoples in the Northwest Amazon. He is a founding board member and Vice-President of the Heffter Research Institute, a non-profit scientific organization dedicated to the investigation of therapeutic applications for psychedelic plants and compounds.

Dr. McKenna was a primary organizer and key scientific collaborator for the Hoasca Project, an international biomedical study of Hoasca (Ayahuasca). He has conducted extensive ethnobotanical fieldwork in the Peruvian, Colombian, and Brazilian Amazon. He is author and co-author of over 35 scientific papers in peer-reviewed journals. His publications have appeared in the Journal of Ethnopharmacology, European Journal of Pharmacology, Brain Research, Journal of Neuroscience, Journal of Neurochemistry, Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease, Economic Botany, and elsewhere. He is co-author, with his brother Terence, of The Invisible Landscape: Mind, Hallucinogens, and the I Ching (1971).