Alum Is a Pioneer in Research on Psychedelics and the Brain

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As hallucinogens gain acceptance as psychiatric treatments, Cornell engineering prof Alex Kwan, PhD ’09, is studying how they work

Editor’s note: This story was adapted from a feature in the Cornell Chronicle. A 2024 Cornellians story about Kwan's collaboration with a fellow alum whose artwork addresses psychedelic themes can be found here.

By David Nutt

Astronomers rarely attempt space travel. Marine biologists are not necessarily certified SCUBA divers. Yet Alex Kwan, PhD ’09, is often asked if he takes psychedelic drugs.

“There is a sector of people who feel strongly that, as a researcher in this topic, you should have the subjective experience and try some of the compounds,” says Kwan, a professor of biomedical engineering in the Duffield College and a driving force in Cornell’s growing multidisciplinary investigation into the relationship between psychedelics and the brain.

“There are other people who think that could cloud your judgment. So there are arguments on both sides. But it’s not something I’ve tried myself.”

From Timothy Leary’s provocative experiments with LSD to the CIA’s infamous MKUltra program, the early attempts to research psychedelic drugs were not exactly models of scientific rigor.

From Timothy Leary’s provocative experiments with LSD to the CIA’s infamous MKUltra program, the early attempts to research psychedelic drugs were not exactly models of scientific rigor.

But as hallucinogens gain more support from the medical community as a potential treatment for severe depression and post-traumatic stress disorder—and with the U.S. government relaxing its regulatory constraints—there remains a vast gap in understanding how the drugs work on the brain.

In recent years, Kwan and other Big Red researchers have made crucial discoveries about the basic neurobiology and mechanics behind psychedelic compounds such as psilocybin.

They’ve shown how psychedelics rewire the brain’s neural pathways and affect its blood flow and how the compounds influence animal behavior, and have developed minimally invasive electrodes that record long-term changes in neural activity in mice—and potentially humans.

“There’s a lot of excitement about using psychedelics in our society, but our actual understanding of the drug remains quite poor,” Kwan says. “The promise is so great, but the thing that I strive for, and what Cornell can contribute, is the basic understanding of the science. We need to fill in the rigor that should be there to balance the promise and the excitement.”

Psychedelic science on the Hill, like the brain itself, depends on a network of deep connections—and the linkage between most of these collaborations is Kwan.

“What I see in Alex’s work, which is really the linchpin that all the rest of us are building on,” says Chris Schaffer, the Meinig Family Professor of Engineering, “is this commitment to slow, methodical, careful, mechanistically oriented experiments and projects that help us really understand what these drugs are doing on a molecular, cellular, neural systems basis.”

The promise is so great, but the thing that I strive for, and what Cornell can contribute, is the basic understanding of the science.

Since Kwan joined the faculty in 2022, his lab has found that a single dose of psilocybin increased the number of neuronal connections in a mouse brain by about 10%; identified key components of the neural circuit that mediates the long-term effects of psilocybin; and shown how psilocybin weakens the feedback loops that lock people into negative thinking while enhancing sensory-motor responses.

“We have been working hard to figure out what are the different cell types and different circuits involved,” Kwan says. “We want to have a brain-wide view of what psychedelics do. And how do we harness the insights to develop better treatment?”

But navigating the policy challenges for studying these drugs has been difficult.

In 1970, psychedelics were designated a Schedule I controlled substance, which meant there were a raft of regulatory hurdles and the federal government would only fund research that studied the drugs’ harmful effects, despite recent clinical trials showing that the drugs have beneficial effects for treating psychiatric disorders.

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We want to have a brain-wide view of what psychedelics do. And how do we harness the insights to develop better treatment?

Then in April 2026, the Trump Administration issued an executive order to consider reclassifying psychedelics—a huge positive impact for the science, according to Schaffer.

“It makes it easier for researchers to get access to them, because it’s this lower-tier license,” says Schaffer, who is also Cornell’s dean of faculty.

“It makes it easier for manufacturers to produce these drugs to be sold in the research market. And it opens the door for the National Institutes of Health or other federal funding agencies to issue calls for proposals or fund grants that are looking for medicinal or other kind of positive benefits of these drugs.”

Kwan first became interested in psychedelics about 12 years ago, as a faculty member in psychiatry at Yale, studying drugs such as ketamine, a dissociative anesthetic that became a serious option for treating depression in the late 1990s.

“We saw an opportunity that psychedelics could become quite useful as medication,” he says. “A lot of people were still hesitant to study them.”

It’s fitting that Kwan continued this research at Cornell. As he recently learned, the University had been the site of one of the earliest attempts to understand how a psychedelic interacts with the brain at a biochemical level.

In 1967, Richard O’Brien—former director of Cornell’s Division of Biological Sciences, who in 1964 helped create the Department of Neurobiology and Behavior—published “Psilocybin: Reaction with a Fraction of Rat Brain” in the journal Science.

While other early researchers were fixated on the subjective experience induced by synthetic drugs such as LSD, O’Brien was prescient in his focus on the organic psilocybin—the active ingredient of magic mushrooms.

“Putting it in historical context, that was the era of the Summer of Love in San Francisco. LSD was king,” Kwan says. “I don’t quite know why Dick O’Brien decided to go with psilocybin. It was an interesting choice.”

It’s fitting that Kwan continued this research at Cornell; the University had been the site of one of the earliest attempts to understand how a psychedelic interacts with the brain at a biochemical level.

Much has changed since O’Brien’s first psilocybin study. The focus has shifted from the hallucinatory experience of psychedelics to their therapeutic effects, and the social stigma that was once attached to the drugs is much lower.

But not for Kwan.

“For me to study it, I had to overcome some barrier. These drugs are very much prohibited in Asia. Where I grew up, which is Hong Kong, any sort of drug is taboo,” he says. “The drug laws are very strict. Your family would disown you if you have any drugs. I still myself deal with that kind of tension.”

One reason psychedelic science is thriving at Cornell, according to Kwan, is the University’s combined expertise in advanced engineering and a range of biological disciplines, including neurobiology and molecular biology.

“Nowadays for biological research, it is big data, where you get massive amounts of gene expression data, massive amounts of imaging data. Cornell has been at the forefront of developing these technologies,” he says. “It’s really good to study this topic from different angles, from biologists to engineers and from psychologists to plant scientists.”

(Top: Photo by Ryan Young / Cornell University.)

Published July 29, 2026

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