Biography

David E. Presti, Ph.D., is a professor of neuroscience at the University of California, Berkeley, where he has taught for 35 years. He also worked for more than a decade in the clinical treatment of addiction and post-traumatic stress at the Veterans Affairs (VA) Medical Center in San Francisco, and since 2004 has been teaching and dialoguing about science with Tibetan Buddhist monastics in India, Bhutan, and Nepal. He has been involved in shifting policy related to research and psychotherapy with psychedelics for 35 years. He has doctorates in biology from Caltech and in clinical psychology from the University of Oregon and is author of the books Foundational Concepts in Neuroscience: A Brain-Mind Odyssey (Norton, 2016) and Mind Beyond Brain: Buddhism, Science, and the Paranormal (Columbia, 2018), and of the edX course Psychedelics and the Mind (2023).