Rick Strassman graduated from Stanford University in 1973, and received his medical degree from Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University in 1977. He completed his training in general psychiatry at the University of California, Davis, Medical Center in Sacramento in 1981, and did a fellowship in clinical psychopharmacology research at the University of California, San Diego from 1982-1983. He began working in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of New Mexico School of Medicine in 1984. There, he initially performed clinical research investigating the function of the pineal hormone melatonin in which his research group documented the first known role of melatonin in humans. He then began the first new US government approved and funded clinical research with psychedelic drugs in over twenty years, focusing on the endogenous compound, DMT. He left the University in 1995, and has since practiced clinical psychiatry. He co-founded the Cottonwood Research Foundation in 2007, for which he serves as president, and is also Clinical Associate Professor of Psychiatry with UNM. He lives in northern New Mexico. bar