Biography
Niloufar Pouyan is a PhD student in the Neuroscience Graduate Program. She holds a PharmD from Azad University in Tehran, Iran, and earned a master's degree in neuroscience from the University of Geneva, Switzerland. During her master’s, she explored the association of neural correlates of mindfulness meditation and longitudinal behavioral outcomes in older adults.
Intrigued by psychedelic-elicited altered states of consciousness and their relationship to mental well-being, she embarked on her journey in psychedelic research by joining the Psychedelic Research & Therapy Development group (Dr. M. Scheidegger) at the psychiatric university hospital in Zurich as a scientific collaborator. To better understand the possible mechanisms underlying the multidomain effects of psychedelics, she conducted two systematic reviews on psilocybin and LSD based on the NIMH’s Research Domain Criteria (RDoC) framework.
She is pursuing her Ph.D. as part of both the Michigan Psychedelic Center (M-PsyC) and the Chronic Pain and Fatigue Research Center (CPFRC). Her aim is to contribute to a mechanistic understanding of how psychedelic-elicited altered states of consciousness affect the physical and affective aspects of chronic pain.