Biography
Jacob S. Aday, Ph.D. is a Research Investigator in the Department of Anesthesiology, with appointments in the Chronic Pain and Fatigue Research Center (CPFRC) as well as the Michigan Psychedelic Center (M-PsyC). He completed his undergraduate and master's degrees in Psychology at Northern Michigan University, where he worked in Dr. Adam Prus’s Neuropsychopharmacology Lab and Dr. Joshua Carlson’s Cognitive Affective Behavior and Integrative Neuroscience (CABIN) Lab. During his doctoral training, Jake was mentored by Drs. Christopher Davoli and Emily Bloesch at Central Michigan University, where they established a productive program of research centered on the emerging field of ‘psychedelic science’. During this time, he was also recruited by Drug Science, the leading independent scientific body on drugs in the UK, to be an honorary research assistant and study under Professor David Nutt. Jake then joined the Translational Psychedelic Research Program (TrPR) at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) as a postdoctoral researcher in 2021. There, he was mentored by Dr. Joshua Woolley on how to design, implement, and interpret complex psychedelic clinical trials. As a Research Investigator in the Department of Anesthesiology, Dr. Aday is interested in the cognitive and social effects of psychedelics, improving research methodology and safety with the drugs, and examining the potential applications of psychedelic therapy for chronic pain.