Michiel van Elk, PhD is associate professor, researcher, and supervisor of the Psychedelic, Religious, Spiritual, and Mystical Experiences Lab at Leiden University in the Netherlands. Michiel is also a board member of the OPEN Foundation. His research focuses on religious and spiritual experiences, and altered states of consciousness (ASCs), as induced through meditation, sensory deprivation, psychedelics and other means. Michiel has published several popular science books on various topics as the Babybrain, the Evolution of Religion, Ecstatic Experiences, and Psychedelics.

Eiko Fried, PhD is a psychologist, a methodologist, and nearly a photographer. He obtained his PhD in clinical psychology at the Free University of Berlin, followed by four years of postdoctoral training in methodology. He returned to clinical psychology in 2018, and today works as associate professor in the Clinical Psychology Department at Leiden University in the Netherlands. Eiko’s research takes place at the intersection of clinical psychology, psychiatry, epidemiology, methodology, and complexity science, and interests are how to best understand, measure, model, and classify mental health problems.