Associate Director, Center for Psychedelic and Consciousness Research, Behavioral Pharmacology Research Unit, Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, Department of Neuroscience
Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine

Dr. Frederick Barrett is a cognitive neuroscientist with training in behavioral pharmacology who has been conducting psychedelic research at Johns Hopkins University since 2013. His research focuses on the psychological and neurological mechanisms underlying the acute subjective and enduring therapeutic effects of psychedelic drugs in heathy participants and in patients with mood and substance use disorders. In 2017, he received the first federally funded human psychedelic research grant in the US since the 1970s. He developed comprehensive questionnaires to measure challenging experiences encountered with psilocybin. He also published the first studies in humans characterizing the enduring effects of psilocybin on the brain (up to a month after psilocybin administration), the effects of psilocybin on a brain structure called the claustrum (which has been proposed to variously mediate consciousness and cognition), the effects of LSD on the brain's response to music, and the effects of the atypical hallucinogen salvinorin A on the human brain. He is currently leading clinical trials to investigate the use of psilocybin to treat patients with major depressive disorder and co-occurring alcohol use disorder, and he is leading ongoing studies aimed at better understanding the psychological, biological, and neural mechanisms underlying therapeutic efficacy of psychedelic drugs.