Season 2024

Dr. Mathew W. Johnson is an experimental psychologist conducting human research on psychedelics and behavior change. From 2004 to 2024 he conducted seminal psychedelic research at Johns Hopkins, playing a role in the modern-day revival of psychedelic research. In March 2024 he joined Sheppard Pratt to expand his psychedelic research. He has published research on psychedelics in relation to mystical experience, personality change, tobacco smoking cessation, cancer distress treatment, depression treatment, and psychedelic risks and safety guidelines. In 2021 he received as principal investigator the first grant in about 50 years from the US government to administer a classic psychedelic as a treatment, specifically psilocybin for tobacco addiction. He is also known for his expertise in behavioral economics, addiction, sexual risk behavior, and research with a wide variety of drug classes. He has been Interviewed by Anderson Cooper on 60 Minutes, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, CNN, NPR, Fox News, BBC, the Lex Fridman Podcast, the Huberman Lab Podcast, Big Think and Michael Pollan. Profile as Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at JHU. Profile as senior researcher for the Center of Excellence for Psilocybin Research and Treatment at Sheppard Pratt’s Institute for Advanced Diagnostics and Therapeutics. Speaker Disclosure: Matthew Johnson serves as consultant to several companies that are developing psychedelics as FDA approved treatments: AJNA Labs, Beckley Psychedelic Ltd., Clarion Clinics, MindMed, Otsuka Pharmaceutical Development & Commercialization, and Reunion Neurosciences.

James G. Matlock received a B.A. in English from Emory University in 1977 and a Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of Southern Illinois at Carbondale in 2002. He worked at the American Society for Psychical Research in New York City and at the Rhine Research Center in Durham, North Carolina. Matlock is presently a Research Fellow at the Parapsychology Foundation. His chief research interests are the history of parapsychology, anthropology of religion, and reincarnation. He teaches a 15-week online seminar course on reincarnation research and theory. Read more in-depth on Matlock and his research. Matlock’s book Signs of Reincarnation: Exploring Beliefs, Cases, and Theory, published by Rowman & Littlefield (2019), provides the first comprehensive look at the belief in reincarnation and the evidence for past lives from historical records, anthropological studies, and contemporary research. Matlock discusses various ways the evidence may be interpreted and shows that although reincarnation entails a rejection of the materialist notion that consciousness is generated by the brain, it does not require the acceptance of any radically new concepts or the abandonment of well-established findings in mainstream psychology or biology. This book offers students, scholars, and anyone interested in the possibility of reincarnation an essential grounding in beliefs, cases, and theory, while opening doors for future research into the extension of consciousness beyond our present lives. See more on Memories of previous lives.

Tom Shroder is the author of Old Souls: Scientific Evidence for Reincarnation From Children Who Remember Past Lives (1999); Acid Test: How a Daring Group of Psychonauts Rediscovered the Power of LSD, MDMA and Other Psychedelic Drugs to Heal Addiction, Depression, Anxiety and Trauma (2014); The Most Famous Writer Who Ever Lived), A True Story of My Family (2016) and co-author of Fire on the Horizon: the Untold Story of the Gulf Oil Disaster (2011). His ghost-written books include The Operator: Firing the Shots that Killed Osama bin Laden and My Years as a SEAL Team Warrior by Robert O’Neill, which spent seven weeks on the New York Times bestseller list and Exposure: Poisoned Water, Corporate Greed, and One Lawyer’s Twenty-Year Battle against DuPont, by Robert Bilott, the true story behind the movie Dark Waters, starring Mark Rufallo. At Tropic Magazine in 1988, he edited the work by Dave Barry that won the Pulitzer Prize for Distinguished Commentary, and as editor of The Washington Post Magazine between 2001 and 2009 he oversaw staff writer Gene Weingarten’s two Pulitzer Prize-winning feature stories, Fiddler in the Subway (2008) and Fatal Distraction (2010). A 25th anniversary edition of Old Souls with a new afterword was published in July. View all of Shroder’s books on Amazon. See Tom Shroder’s website.

Frederick Kaufman, Ph.D., is Professor of English and Journalism at the City University of New York. A contributing editor at Harper’s Magazine, his nonfiction has appeared in The New York Times Sunday Magazine, The New Yorker, Harper’s, Foreign Policy, Fortune, The Los Angeles Times, The Guardian, Lapham’s Quarterly, Literary Hub, Scientific American, Salon, Slate, Nature, Wired, Vice, British Medical Journal, and numerous other publications. He is the author of four books, most recently The Money Plot: A History from Shells to Bullion to Bitcoin. Other books include Bet the Farm: How Food Stopped Being Food, and the award-winning A Short History of the American Stomach. He hosted and executive produced a Webby-nominated documentary film for Vice Reports, and has appeared on MSNBC, Bloomberg TV, Fox Business News, Democracy Now!, C-Span, National Public Radio’s Radiolab, On the Media, and the BBC World Service, among numerous other broadcasts and podcasts. He has lectured throughout the United States and abroad, including addresses to the National Press Club, PEN, and the General Assembly of the United Nations. Frederick Kaufman’s profile at CUNY School of Journalism.

Jennifer Keohane is associate professor at the University of Baltimore, where she directs the undergraduate program in digital communication and oversees the general education program in oral communication. She holds an MA and PhD from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in rhetoric, politics, and culture, where she studied women affiliated with the American Communist Party, a project that became the book Feminist Voices and Communist Rhetoric in Cold War America. As a rhetorical critic, Jennifer studies how advocates for social movements use symbols like language and images to make change in the world. In 2016, she co-founded the research lab for Character Assassination and Reputation Politics (CARP), where she studies how invective is weaponized in political communication. In collaboration with this research lab, she co-edited the Routledge Handbook of Character Assassination and Reputation Management and co-wrote Character Assassination and Reputation Management: Theory and Applications. You can also find her work in academic journals like Women’s Studies in Communication, Rhetoric Society Quarterly, Rhetoric Review, and the Journal for the History of Rhetoric.

Dr. Elizabeth M H Newbury is the Director for the Serious Games Initiative for the Wilson Center, leading the Wilson Center’s use of games in engaging the public around policy research. As lead of the Serious Games Initiative, she leverages games as a tool for the public communication of science and policy research. Under her leadership, SGI is pursuing how public policy and science can come together in an interactive platform to increase public dialogue and engagement around timely and critical issues of today. Current projects include the Fiscal Ship, a game about the federal budget developed and maintained in collaboration with the Hutchins Center on Fiscal and Monetary Policy with the Brookings Institute. The Wilson Center’s budget games have been played by over 3 million people worldwide. Collaborating across the Wilson Center, her works in progress include games pertaining to topics ranging from cybsecurity and plastic pollution. Outside of the Wilson Center, she helps coordinate across federal agencies to help support the ecosystem of games used for social good, through chairing the Federal Games Guild, an informal community of practice with over 100 agency participants united by the purpose to see how they can leverage gaming technologies to meet mission goals. She holds a B.A. in anthropology from Bryn Mawr College, and a Master and PhD from the Department of Communication at Cornell University, where her research interests revolved around understanding multiple dimensions of gaming audiences and the surrounding culture of those who play video games in the context of esports. She married into a Baltimore family and is contractually obligated to support the Ravens and O’s (when they don’t compete with the Nationals).

Dr. Lance Yong Jin Park is Professor at the School of Communications at Howard University and Faculty Associate at Harvard Law School. His works focus on the effects of emerging AI technologies in intersection with social and policy problems. Currently, his research looks at how the combination of AI, algorithm, and personal data contributes to social and racial inequalities in information consumption. Dr. Lance Yong Jin Park’s book The Future of Digital Surveillance (University of Michigan Press, 2021) examines AI in its perpetual appetite for data surveillance, AI and social media. He was an inaugural 2022-23 BKC, RSM Visiting Professor, at Harvard; received several external grants from Facebook, Scripps Foundation, ANA, Urban Comm. Foundation, and more. The most recent grant is from Mozilla Foundation, as the grant aims to study and teach how to debias AI algorithmic modeling. He was previously a Research Fellow at the Center for Information Technology Policy at Princeton University, and EPIC (Electronic Privacy Info Center), DC. He made a policy testimony at FCC; consulted FTC for dark patterns online; and received numerous top papers awards from top info-communication conferences. He completed his doctorate at the University of Michigan and his MA at USC Annenberg School.

Mark Feldstein spent 20 years as an award-winning on-air investigative correspondent at CNN, ABC News and various local television stations. On assignment, he was beaten up, subpoenaed and sued in the U.S.; detained and censored by government authorities in Egypt; and escorted out of the country under armed guard in Haiti. His exposés led to resignations, firings, multimillion dollar fines and prison terms — and more than 50 journalism awards, including two George Foster Peabody medallions, the Columbia-DuPont baton, the national Edward R. Murrow broadcasting prize and nine regional Emmys. As a scholar, Feldstein has been published in numerous peer-reviewed journals. His book “Poisoning the Press” earned top academic awards for research and was selected by The Washington Post and other newspapers as a best book of the year. Feldstein is regularly quoted as a media analyst by leading outlets in the U.S. and abroad, and has testified as an expert witness on First Amendment issues before Congress and in court, most recently on behalf of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. He has traveled to more than 30 countries and lectured around the world on investigative reporting, censorship, freedom of the press, and journalism history and ethics.