Johns Hopkins Center for Psychedelic and Consciousness Research
Founded in 2019 by the late Roland Griffiths, one of the field's most cited researchers, Hopkins runs some of the most influential psilocybin trials in the space, including foundational work on depression, addiction, and end-of-life anxiety that other institutions on this list still build on. Griffiths died in October 2023; the center continues under Johns Hopkins' Department of Psychiatry.
Disclosed partnerships:Launched with $17 million in private gifts, including named donations from Tim Ferriss, WordPress co-founder Matt Mullenweg, TOMS founder Blake Mycoskie, and the Steven & Alexandra Cohen Foundation, which covered the center's operating costs for its first five years.
Imperial College London Centre for Psychedelic Research
The world's first university center built specifically around psychedelic research, founded in 2019 under Robin Carhart-Harris, who has since moved primarily to UCSF. The center's work treats psilocybin both as a candidate depression treatment and as a scientific tool for studying consciousness itself.
Disclosed partnerships:Its funder list includes a long roster of individual and foundation donors, plus two industry names: Beckley Psytech and Mydecine Innovations Group are both listed as financial supporters.
Established in 2021 under Michael Bogenschutz, with Stephen Ross — one of the field's earliest psilocybin researchers — as associate director. The center's launch was funded by a mix of industry and philanthropic money in a way few academic centers disclose this openly.
Disclosed partnerships:MindMed contributed $5 million, the single largest gift toward the center's $10 million-plus launch. Other named donors include Heffter Research Institute president Carey Turnbull and Usona Institute president Bill Linton — a founding roster that overlaps with several other institutions on this list.
Launched in 2021 under Joshua Woolley, TrPR is where Robin Carhart-Harris relocated after Imperial, and where UCSF runs trial work tied directly to Usona Institute's psilocybin program.
Disclosed partnerships:A $2 million anonymous gift got the program started; Usona Institute contributed $1 million tied to TrPR's role in Usona's psilocybin trial. TrPR also has a direct research partnership with Filament Health to move drug candidates through FDA Phase 1/2 trials.
Co-directed by Christopher Pittenger and Benjamin Kelmendi, Yale's program grew out of a psychiatry department interest group dating to 2016 and is best known for psilocybin-for-OCD research — a condition most other centers on this list aren't studying.
Disclosed partnerships:The Steven & Alexandra Cohen Foundation funds a study on optimal psilocybin dosing for OCD. Heffter Research Institute president Carey Turnbull is also a named individual donor to Yale's program, part of a giving pattern that spans Yale, NYU, and Johns Hopkins.
UC Berkeley Center for the Science of Psychedelics
Founded in 2020 under neuroscientist Michael Silver, BCSP studies what psychedelics actually do to perception and cognition — visual effects, mystical-type experience, and longer-term shifts in social attitudes — rather than running its own clinical depression trials.
Disclosed partnerships:About $7 million in disclosed gifts, including two anonymous donors, close to $1 million from the Steven & Alexandra Cohen Foundation, and over $800,000 from Tim Ferriss's Saisei Foundation specifically funding a journalism fellowship on psychedelics.
Ohio State University Center for Psychedelic Drug Research and Education
Founded in 2022 under Alan Davis, CPDRE has an explicit focus on populations most psychedelic research has historically excluded, alongside training the next wave of clinicians and researchers.
Disclosed partnerships:Launched with $1.5 million from two anonymous donors. A separate $400,000 state grant from Ohio's Department of Behavioral Health funds CPDRE's P.E.A.C.E. program, run in partnership with MAPS.
University of Wisconsin-Madison Transdisciplinary Center for Research in Psychoactive Substances
Founded in 2021 under pharmacist-researcher Paul Hutson out of UW-Madison's School of Pharmacy, with a genuinely broad mandate — active MDMA-for-PTSD and psilocybin-for-depression trials alongside the cultural and historical study of these compounds.
Disclosed partnerships:In 2026, alumna Thora M. Vervoren endowed the first pharmacy professorship of its kind in the US specifically for psychedelic research, with Hutson as its inaugural holder. The center says it is actively seeking industry partnerships but hasn't named one yet.
MAPS (Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies)
Founded in 1986 by Rick Doblin, MAPS spun off its MDMA drug-development work into a for-profit arm in 2014, which became Lykos Therapeutics and then, after the FDA's 2024 rejection and a recapitalization, Resilient Pharmaceuticals in 2025. MAPS itself now runs policy advocacy, a cannabis-for- veterans trial, and decriminalization work — no longer the drug-development engine it's still often associated with.
Disclosed partnerships:MAPS retains a minority stake in Resilient (formerly Lykos), including board representation, down from its earlier majority control. The Steven & Alexandra Cohen Foundation gave MAPS a $5 million grant in 2023, partly earmarked for veteran and first-responder PTSD treatment access.
Founded in 2014 by Promega founder Bill Linton and physician Malynn Utzinger, Usona is a donor-funded nonprofit research organization — not a company — despite running one of the field's most advanced psilocybin trials, uAspire.
Disclosed partnerships:Usona doesn't publish a donor list, but the Steven & Alexandra Cohen Foundation names it as a grantee under a large psychedelic-research initiative shared with UC San Diego, the California Institute of Integral Studies, and MAPS.
Incorporated in 1993 by chemist David Nichols and a group of co-founders including Dennis McKenna, Heffter doesn't run its own trials — it's a "virtual institute" that funds and evaluates research happening elsewhere, and has quietly seeded a disproportionate share of the field.
Disclosed partnerships:Heffter has funded studies at the University of Arizona, NYU, and Johns Hopkins, including a grant that helped build a joint postdoctoral fellowship spanning Hopkins, Yale, and NYU. Its board is intertwined with the field it funds — Roland Griffiths, Hopkins' founding director, sat on Heffter's board.
Founded in 1998 by Amanda Feilding, who died in May 2025. It's easy to confuse with Beckley Psytech, the for-profit drug-development company Feilding co-founded with her son — but they are legally separate: the Foundation is a UK charity focused on research and policy, distinct from the company, which has since merged with atai Life Sciences and is now being acquired by Eli Lilly.
Disclosed partnerships:The Foundation does not disclose a specific donor list beyond general support, and its current leadership since Feilding's death is unclear from public sources.
Founded in 2023 and formally launched in 2025 under psychiatrist Liliana Galindo, CPRG is a three-way partnership between the University of Cambridge and two NHS trusts — a structure that ties the research directly to the clinical system that would eventually deliver any resulting treatment.
Disclosed partnerships:Named research collaborators include Imperial College London, the University of Bristol's BRIGHT program, Clerkenwell Health, and the charity Supporting Wounded Veterans, which is funding an MDMA trial for veterans and first responders.
Run by clinical pharmacologist Matthias Liechti out of University Hospital Basel, this lab has produced more controlled human LSD studies than almost anywhere else — several trials on this site's Trials tracker trace back here.
Disclosed partnerships:In 2020, MindMed signed a multi-year exclusive deal for worldwide rights to the lab's LSD research — clinical trial data, compounds, and patent rights — in exchange for research funding and milestone payments, one of the more direct academic-to-biotech pipelines in the field.
Opened in 2023 at Maudsley Hospital under Allan Young and James Rucker, this group is the physical home of COMPASS Pathways' UK clinical psilocybin work — a genuine research partnership, not just a branding arrangement.
Disclosed partnerships:Beyond COMPASS Pathways and the South London and Maudsley NHS Trust, the group's own funder list includes the UK's National Institute for Health and Care Research, MAPS, Beckley Psytech, MindMed, Wellcome, and Cybin — about as concentrated a snapshot of the field's funders as exists anywhere on this list.
Parsons Research Center for Psychedelic Healing, Mount Sinai
Launched in 2020 under trauma researcher Rachel Yehuda, based at Mount Sinai and the Bronx VA, this center trains therapists and runs trials specifically on veteran and trauma populations — renamed in 2024 after its founding funder expanded support.
Disclosed partnerships:The Bob & Renee Parsons Foundation has given $10 million across two gifts — $5 million in 2021 and another $5 million in 2024 — funding therapist training, an MDMA group-therapy protocol for veterans, and the center's new Manhattan facility.