Where they are
- Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin
- Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin
- Freie Universität Berlin
- MSB Medical School Berlin
- Clinical site, not a research group
- Where our talks happen
The groups
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Psychedelic Substances Research Group Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin · Department of Psychiatry and Neurosciences
- Who
- Led by Dr. med. Dimitris Repantis and Dr. med. Tomislav Majić, with around two dozen physicians, psychologists, philosophers and doctoral students.
- What they study
- Both ends of the subject at once. The therapeutic end: psilocybin, LSD, DMT and mescaline for depression, addiction, OCD and the distress of life-threatening illness; MDMA for PTSD; ketamine. And the end most clinics avoid — what happens when it goes wrong. Persisting perceptual changes (HPPD), depersonalisation, psychotic episodes, and harm reduction for people who use outside any clinic.
- Key work
- EPIsoDE, Germany's psilocybin trial for treatment-resistant depression, run with the Central Institute of Mental Health in Mannheim: 144 patients, three arms, and a negative primary endpoint — response was 17 % on 25 mg psilocybin against 10.6 % on active placebo (JAMA Psychiatry, 2026). Secondary measures did show a clinically meaningful drop in symptoms. Also the systematic review that defined the psychedelic "afterglow" window, and the cross-cutting PsychedELSI project on the ethical, legal and social side of the psychedelic renaissance (BMBF-funded, 2023–2026, coordinated here).
- Running now
- A trial of CYB003, a deuterated psilocin analogue, in major depression. PPaPS, on psychological symptoms that persist after psychedelic use. PsyTrans, comparing the ethics and culture of the new psychedelic therapies in Germany and Taiwan.
- How to get in
- If you have lasting effects after LSD, psilocybin, DMT, ayahuasca, mescaline or MDMA, PPaPS wants to hear from you — an anonymous online survey, about 20 minutes, open to anyone over 18. Clinically, Majić sees patients at the Charité psychiatric university clinic at St. Hedwig (the open ring on the map). No standing thesis advert; ask by email.
Bonhoefferweg 3 (Charitéplatz 1), 10117 Berlin · Campus Charité Mitte
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Psychotropic Substances Research Group Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin · Department of Psychiatry and Neurosciences
- Who
- Headed by PD Dr. med. Stefan Gutwinski, Dr. med. Tomislav Majić and PD Dr. med. Inge Maria Mick. The sister group to number 1, and the wider one.
- What they study
- Psychoactive substances in general, with a stated emphasis on the illegalised ones: experimental behavioural and imaging studies of their effects on consciousness; who uses what and why, including new psychoactive substances; what drug policy, prevention and treatment actually achieve; dependence and comorbid psychosis; and the anthropological, historical and sociological side of the whole thing.
- Key work
- The scientific evaluation of Berlin's drug-checking programme — 1,120 samples from 530 people, of which only 44.8 % contained what the person thought they had bought, and 53.7 % held something unexpected. People who were told so were about five times more likely not to take it (final report October 2024, with the Frankfurt Institute for Addiction Research). It is the rare piece of psychedelic-adjacent research that changed a policy.
- How to get in
- The group currently lists nine doctoral candidates, three master's students and three research interns — so it does take people, and at every level. Write to the department and name the topic you want.
Charitéplatz 1, 10117 Berlin · Campus Charité Mitte
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Research Group Recreational Drugs Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin · Department of Psychiatry and Neurosciences
- Who
- Headed by PD Dr. med. Felix Betzler.
- What they study
- The substances people take for pleasure rather than for a diagnosis — amphetamine, MDMA, cocaine, ketamine, cannabis, psilocybin, LSD. Prevalence, patterns and motives in the party scene, among students and in other subcultures; whether prevention campaigns work; and, separately, the therapeutic side.
- Key work
- Longitudinal survey work on Berlin students: personality change after a first psychedelic experience, following university students in Germany through it (npj Mental Health Research, 2026). Betzler also co-authored the EPIsoDE trial.
- How to get in
- Survey-based research, which means it genuinely needs participants and people to run them — the most approachable epidemiology on this map if you want a first project rather than a lab bench.
Charitéplatz 1, 10117 Berlin · Campus Charité Mitte
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Larkum Lab Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin · Institut für Biologie, at Charité CrossOver
- Who
- Prof. Matthew Larkum, spokesperson of the collaborative research centre SFB 1315.
- What they study
- Not psychedelics — and that is exactly why it belongs here. The lab works on how a layer-5 pyramidal neuron combines the sensory input arriving at its body with the feedback arriving, far away, at the tip of its apical dendrite. Out of this came Dendritic Integration Theory (Aru, Suzuki & Larkum, Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 2020), which locates conscious processing in that coupling, and the finding that chemically unrelated general anaesthetics all converge on one mechanism: they decouple apical dendrites from the cell body (Cell, 2020).
- Why it is on this map
- Because the current cellular accounts of psychedelics are built on top of it. 5-HT2A receptors sit densely on precisely those apical dendrites, and the 2026 proposals — "apical amplification", "apical hypercontextualisation" — are attempts to explain a psychedelic as an apical-drive problem. The lab itself has published nothing on psilocybin or LSD. It supplies the machinery the theory borrows.
- Key work
- Active cortical dendrites modulate perception (Science, 2016). Currently funded by an ERC Advanced Grant, Dendro-somatic coupling and global neuronal signalling — €2.5 million over five years, to work out the basis of anaesthesia in mammals.
- How to get in
- No standing advert; this is an in-vivo electrophysiology lab, so expect to need a reason. matthew.larkum@hu-berlin.de
Charité CrossOver, Virchowweg 6 (Charitéplatz 1), 10117 Berlin
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Decision Circuits Lab Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin · Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience & Institut für Biologie
- Who
- Dr. Torben Ott, who started the group at the Bernstein Center with DFG Emmy Noether funding after a postdoc with Adam Kepecs.
- What they study
- Decisions written out as explicit algorithms, in rats, mice and humans at the same time — and how dopamine and serotonin retune the cortical circuits that run them. The psychedelic thread is stated outright among the lab's four research lines: how drugs alter these computations, and how they produce subjective states such as hallucinations.
- Key work
- With Katharina Schmack and Adam Kepecs, a way to measure hallucination-like perception in mice and in people with the same task, showing a causal role for striatal dopamine (Science, 2021), plus the companion argument for doing computational psychiatry across species (JAMA Psychiatry, 2021). In 2026, two preprints with the Allen Institute: psilocybin collapsing visual change detection and pushing cortex toward a state of surprise, and a brain-wide reconfiguration of burst firing under psilocybin that depends on the 5-HT2A receptor.
- How to get in
- The clearest answer on this whole map. The lab accepts master's thesis projects — experimental, computational or both — and one of the four advertised topics is how drugs produce subjective states such as hallucinations. Email Ott with a short motivation and CV.
Philippstraße 13, Haus 18, 10115 Berlin · +49 30 2093 98520
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Lueken Lab — the psychedelic strand Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin · Institut für Psychologie, Campus Adlershof
- Who
- Prof. Dr. Ulrike Lueken and Dr. Ricarda Evens, who also sits in the Charité group above. Part of the German Centre for Mental Health (DZPG), Berlin-Potsdam site, and one floor away from number 7, with whom they publish.
- What they study
- An anxiety- and trauma-first clinical psychology department with a serious psychedelic strand running through it: what happens in the days and weeks after a psychedelic, what to do when that window goes badly, and whether non-drug routes arrive at the same place.
- Key work
- The systematic review that put a name and a shape on the "afterglow" — the subacute effects of classic serotonergic psychedelics (Therapeutic Advances in Psychopharmacology, 2023). A naturalistic survey of PTSD symptoms following psychedelic use (Psychological Medicine, 2026). A landscape analysis of every pre-registered classical-psychedelic trial (Journal of Psychopharmacology, 2025). And an expert evaluation of high-ventilation breathwork as a non-pharmacological model for psychedelic-like states (npj Mental Health Research, 2026).
- How to get in
- A teaching department, so Bachelor's and Master's theses run through it in the normal way — and the surveys above recruit online, which is the lowest-friction way to contribute to psychedelic research in this city.
Rudower Chaussee 18, 12489 Berlin (visiting) · postal: Unter den Linden 6, 10099 Berlin
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Clinical Psychology of Social Interaction — the breathwork line Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin · Institut für Psychologie, Campus Adlershof
- Who
- Prof. Dr. Isabel Dziobek, with the breathwork work carried by Nina Hartter, Maria Badanova, Barbara Breitenstein and colleagues. Also at the Berlin School of Mind and Brain and the DZPG Berlin-Potsdam site — and in the same building as number 6.
- What they study
- The lab's day job is social interaction: autism, social anxiety, personality disorders. Its altered-states line is high-ventilation breathwork — breathing deliberately faster and deeper than usual until the state changes. No substance, no licence, no narcotics law. And a dose you can put down mid-session, simply by breathing normally again, which is something no psychedelic offers.
- Key work
- Forty-eight mental health professionals went through a breathwork workshop and rated the states they reached as comparable in intensity to moderate doses of serotonergic psychedelics. They proposed internalising disorders as indications, and named psychotic, dissociative and bipolar disorders as contraindications (Lueken, Dziobek et al., npj Mental Health Research, 2026 — a paper shared with number 6). A global survey of practitioners then found that the less people avoided what came up during a session, the better they felt in the days afterwards (Erdmann et al., Frontiers in Psychology, 2026).
- Running now
- Exhaling the past, a neuropsychological test of breathwork as a tool for processing trauma, measured against progressive muscle relaxation (Tiny Blue Dot Foundation, since 2024). And BreathDep, newly funded in the DZPG VISIONS26 line in February 2026.
- How to get in
- Two open doors, and the widest on this map. The chair invites Master's theses outright — current topics are posted in the KliPP Moodle. And "Exhaling the past" is recruiting people who have never done breathwork or progressive muscle relaxation before, so inexperience is the qualification.
Rudower Chaussee 18, 12489 Berlin · Campus Adlershof, same building as 6
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Neurocomputation and Neuroimaging Unit Freie Universität Berlin · with the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience Berlin (CCNB), Dahlem
- Who
- Prof. Dr. Felix Blankenburg leads the unit; the CCNB next door is the shared scanner. The altered-states work here runs through Timo T. Schmidt (number 9), Till Nierhaus and Ioanna Amaya.
- What they study
- The perception–action cycle with fMRI and EEG, including conscious and unconscious perception. The psychedelic connection is the flicker line: stroboscopic light as a drug-free route into visual hallucinations, and what thalamus and cortex do while it happens. Legal, repeatable, and it needs no ethics committee's permission to hand anyone a controlled substance.
- Key work
- Flicker light stimulation induces thalamocortical hyperconnectivity with the LGN and higher-order thalamic nuclei (Imaging Neuroscience, 2023). Thalamocortical interactions scale with the intensity of the hallucinatory phenomena (Network Neuroscience, 2025). How frequency and rhythmicity of the light change what you see (PLOS ONE, 2023).
- How to get in
- The unit runs FU's M.Sc. Cognitive Neuroscience, which Timo Schmidt coordinates — the single most direct degree route into altered-states research in Berlin. Scanning happens at the CCNB in the Silberlaube.
Habelschwerdter Allee 45, 14195 Berlin · Silberlaube, FU Dahlem campus
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Professorship of Cognitive Neuroscience MSB Medical School Berlin · Faculty of Natural Sciences, Wilmersdorf
- Who
- Prof. Dr. Timo Torsten Schmidt — who also sits in the Charité group (1), teaches at the FU (8), and is our speaker on 20 October 2026.
- What they study
- The measurement problem underneath all of this: how do you compare one altered state to another at all? Schmidt built the Altered States Database, which pulled the psychometric questionnaire data out of 165 published studies of pharmacological and non-pharmacological altered states, so that an LSD dose, a meditation retreat and a flicker lamp can finally be put on the same axes (Scientific Data, 2022; open data on OSF).
- Key work
- Dose–response relationships for psilocybin's subjective effects, built from that database. Classification schemes of altered states (2025). The 2015 paper with Majić and Gallinat on peak experiences and the afterglow, which asked early whether the therapeutic effect depends on the experience — still one of the field's open questions. Plus the Altered Xperience citizen-science project.
- How to get in
- The database is open. If you want to do psychedelic research in Berlin this week rather than next year, the honest answer is to download the ASDB and ask it something nobody has asked it yet.
Rüdesheimer Straße 50, 14197 Berlin
How this map was made, and what is missing from it
The rule we used: a university research group in Berlin that publishes peer-reviewed work on psychedelics or on altered states of consciousness. Everything here was checked against the group's own pages and its publications, not against press coverage. Where a group's psychedelic connection is indirect, we say so on its card rather than quietly inflating it.
- Deliberately not here: the MIND Foundation, OVID Clinic Berlin, atai Life Sciences and the other Berlin companies, therapy-training providers, and drug-checking as a service rather than as research. All of them matter to psychedelics in Berlin. None of them is an academic research group, which is what this map is about.
- Not in Berlin: the Central Institute of Mental Health in Mannheim, which is the other half of EPIsoDE and arguably the centre of gravity of German psychedelic medicine.
- People who left: Katharina Schmack, whose hallucinating-mice work was done with Berlin co-authors, now runs her own lab at the Francis Crick Institute in London. The Berlin scene is small, and some of its best-known names are in it only by alumni ties.
- One address, several groups: numbers 1, 2 and 3 are three separate research groups inside one Charité department at one address, and 6 and 7 are two chairs in one building in Adlershof — which is why those pins read 1–3 and 6–7 rather than carrying a single number.
Something wrong, something missing, a group we overlooked? Tell us and we will fix it: bpsa@psng.info. Boundaries, rivers and lakes come from Berlin's open geodata and OpenStreetMap; coordinates were geocoded with Nominatim.