Recovering Our World.

Dr Wade Davis

Explorer · Anthropologist · Author

Named by the National Geographic Society as one of the Explorers for the Millennium, Wade Davis has been described as “a rare combination of scientist, scholar, poet and passionate defender of all of life’s diversity.” As a botanical explorer, and later Explorer-in-Residence at the National Geographic Society (2000–2013) and Professor of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia (2014–2024) his work has taken him from the Amazon to Tibet, Africa to Australia, Polynesia to the Arctic. His 24 books, published in 26 languages, include the international best sellers The Serpent and the Rainbow, One River, The Wayfinders, Magdalena and Into the Silence, winner of the 2012 Samuel Johnson prize, the top nonfiction prize in the English language. National Geographic Books has published two collections of his photographs, Light at the Edge of the World and Wade Davis: Photographs. His 40 film credits include Light at the Edge of the World, an 8-hour documentary series written and produced for the National Geographic, and Sendero de la Anaconda, the most watched documentary in the history of Colombian cinema. One of 20 Honorary Members of the Explorers Club, Davis is Honorary Vice-President of the Royal Canadian Geographical Society, and recipient of 12 honorary degrees, as well as the 2009 Gold Medal from the Royal Canadian Geographical Society, the 2011 Explorers Medal, the 2012 David Fairchild Medal for botanical exploration, the 2015 Centennial Medal of Harvard University, the 2017 Roy Chapman Andrews Society’s Distinguished Explorer Award, the 2017 Sir Christopher Ondaatje Medal for Exploration, and the 2018 Mungo Park Medal from the Royal Scottish Geographical Society. In 2016, he was made a Member of the Order of Canada. In 2018 he became an Honorary Citizen of Colombia. When not traveling, Davis divides his time between his home on Bowen Island, and a remote fishing lodge in Tahltan territory in northern British Columbia.

Dr Bayo Akomolafe

Philosopher · Psychologist · Founder, The Emergence Network

Philosopher, psychologist, poet and essayist, born in western Nigeria to Yoruba parents, whose work invites us to slow down and meet the crises of our times differently. He is the founder of The Emergence Network and the originator of postactivism, a call to look beyond familiar strategies of change and attend to the cracks where something new might emerge. He teaches at Pacifica Graduate Institute, has been an associate adjunct professor at the University of Vermont and a visiting professor at Middlebury College, and serves on the board of Science and Non-Duality. He is the author of These Wilds Beyond Our Fences: Letters to My Daughter on Humanity’s Search for Home, and co-author, with Molefi Kete Asante and Augustine Nwoye, of We Will Tell Our Own Story. In 2021 he received the New Thought Walden Award. He lives between India and the United States.

Dr Simon Ruffell

Psychiatrist · Researcher · Founder, Onaya Science

Trained across three modalities: Western medicine as a doctor specializing in psychiatry, research psychology with a PhD in Amazonian ayahuasca and mental health, and traditional plant medicine as a student of Shipibo curanderismo. Founder and Executive Director of Onaya Science, a nonprofit researching ayahuasca in naturalistic Amazonian settings alongside education rooted in Indigenous knowledge. Lecturer in Psychology and Psychedelics at the University of Exeter and Executive Director of the Center for MINDS. His work centres on understanding plant medicines from both Indigenous and Western perspectives, supporting a more integrative and relational approach to healing.

Dr Rosalind Watts

Clinical Psychologist · Researcher · Founder, ACER Integration

Clinical psychologist, mother, and nature lover. Her work as Clinical Lead for Imperial College London’s psilocybin trial has made her one of the most prominent voices and minds in the field of psychedelic research. She has been named one of the 50 Most Influential People in Psychedelics, and one of the Top 16 Women Shaping the Future of Psychedelics. What sets her apart is her focus on integration, harm reduction and inclusion in the psychedelic space. She builds tools and structures to foster connectedness after psychedelic experiences, finding the inspiration for their design in nature. Through all of her work, her main learning has been that safe and effective use of psychedelics requires substantial integration support. She co-founded the UK’s first psychedelic integration group, and in 2022 launched ACER Integration, standing for Accept, Connect, Embody, Restore, a global online community whose participants follow a thirteen-month process together, connecting more deeply to the self, to others, and to nature.

Dr Christopher Timmermann

Neuroscientist · Researcher · Co-Director, UCL Centre for Consciousness Research

Dr Chris Timmermann is Co-Director of the UCL Centre for Consciousness Research, where he studies some of the deepest questions about the human mind: the nature of consciousness and the self, how our experience of reality is constructed, and whether altered states can contribute to human flourishing. A leading researcher at the intersection of neuroscience, psychedelics, and contemplative practice, Chris pioneered some of the first investigations into how DMT and 5-MeO-DMT affect the human brain and consciousness. He led the DMT Research Group at Imperial College London and has studied experiences ranging from ego dissolution and mystical states to the striking parallels between psychedelic and near-death experiences. His current work brings psychedelic science into dialogue with meditation and contemplative traditions, including research comparing 5-MeO-DMT with advanced meditation as radically different pathways into altered states of consciousness. Across his work, Chris explores a question that sits at the frontier of both science and spirituality: what can extraordinary states of consciousness teach us about the mind, the nature of the self, and our capacity for connection, meaning, and human flourishing.

Dr Michael Ryoshin Sapiro

Psychologist · Zen Monk · Author

A clinical psychologist, ordained Zen Buddhist monk and poet, whose work sits where contemplative practice meets the science of transformation. He teaches internationally on expanded human capability, psychedelic psychotherapy, and what he calls futuremaking. He is a Fellow at the Institute of Noetic Sciences and teaches on the Psychedelics Today certification programme. His research collaborations, with Dan Siegel and Cassandra Vieten among others, look at interconnectedness, compassion, belonging and well-being. In his clinical practice he offers ketamine assisted psychotherapy to first responders, to special operations combat veterans, and to people from his own community, work that keeps the theory honest. His book Truth Medicine, on healing and living authentically through psychedelic psychotherapy, was published by Hachette Go in 2025. He describes his purpose plainly, as personal awakening for the sake of collective transformation. Returns from Spetses 2026.

Angel Grant

Founder, The Relational Estate Advisory · Co-founder, Death Over Dinner

Angel Grant is founder of The Relational Estate Advisory, a practice focused on supporting the emotional and relational challenges of loss and legacy. She is cofounder of Death Over Dinner and Drugs Over Dinner, global movements that have inspired more than 200,000 dinners across 30 countries. Her work brings people into honest conversations about death, addiction, the healing potential of entheogens, and the relationships that shape our lives, including the one with ourselves.

A writer and meditation teacher focused for nearly three decades on consciousness, Angel explores how fear can be part of an inheritance that shapes what we believe, how we relate, and what we permit ourselves to want and create. Her work examines the cost of belonging when it requires us to abandon ourselves, and how we recover agency without sacrificing connection. Since 2010, she has trained teachers and facilitators in meditation, yoga, somatic awareness, and emotional intelligence. She has worked alongside her longtime mentor, Dr Gabor Maté, in trauma-healing retreats and has developed programs for adolescent treatment, wilderness therapy, and under-resourced schools and communities.

Her teaching and speaking highlights include the U.S. Surgeon General's Facing Addiction in America Summit, the Dalai Lama's 80th birthday gathering with Peak Mind Foundation, Kripalu, Summit Series, Science and Nonduality, The Shift Network's Psychedelic Healing Summit, and the New York Academy of Medicine with Lab/Shul. Across private work, retreats, and public dialogue, she invites people to face difficult truths, have the conversations that matter, and discern their own voice from inherited fear and the expectations of others, to live interdependently. She lives in Charleston, SC with her son, Sebastian, and their spaniel, Jasper.

Lara Tambacopoulou

One Sanctum Founder

Founder of One Sanctum and curator of its gatherings. A systemic and transgenerational psychotherapist, Family Constellations facilitator and psychedelic-assisted therapist, Lara weaves the personal, the ancestral and the collective into a single field of healing. A lifelong seeker of solace in a world marked by conflict, trauma and social unrest, she has come to understand that the only true antidote lies in remembering what happens when we loosen our grip on the self and surrender into the sea of an ever-evolving field of multi-relationality.