N. Neal Pike Scholar and Professor of Law, Boston University School of Law

Academic Fellow Alumnus
2008-2010

Paul Gillis-Smith is a program lead on psychedelics and spirituality, as part of the Transcendence and Transformation Initiative at the Center for the Study of World Religions. He is an alum of Harvard Divinity School (M.Div ’24), where he focused on the history of psychiatry as it relates to psychedelic medicine and chaplaincy. He has published on the philosophical underpinnings and genealogy of the primary psychometric tool for quantifying mystical experience in psychedelic research, the Mystical Experience Questionnaire (Breau and Gillis-Smith, 2023), and his thesis presented a historical triangulation between psychoanalysis, psychiatric chaplaincy, and critiques of psychiatry as they emerged from R.D. Laing, Gilles Deleuze, and Felix Guattari. Grounding his research in hands-on practice, Paul was also the inaugural student chaplain in the Office of Ministry Studies’s ketamine chaplaincy program at Brigham and Women’s Faulkner Hospital. Paul co-produced the Harvard Psychedelic Walking Tour, co-facilitated the Center’s first reading group on psychedelics and religion, and he has co-organized the Center’s conference on psychedelics since 2023.