Larissa J. Maier

Biography

Dr. Maier is a visionary psychologist who is passionate about consciousness, health, and human rights. In 2022 and 2023, she traveled to South America and Africa to learn more about Indigenous culture, communal organization, and the traditional and ceremonial uses of psychedelic plants and fungi.

She is committed to ending the criminalization of people who use drugs and aims to create more freely accessible community spaces to increase education about and access to holistic mental health and harm reduction services. During her 3.5 years as a postdoc at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) funded by the SNSF, NIDA, and NIDA INVEST, she investigated the implementation of local, federal, and international cannabis and opioid policies. Dr. Maier holds a BSc, MSc, and PhD from the University of Zurich and graduated summa cum laude. She worked at the Swiss Research Institute for Public Health and Addiction (ISGF) in Zurich and at the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) in Vienna.

Dr. Maier is a member of the Core Research Team of Global Drug Survey (GDS) aiming to make drug use safer, regardless of the legal status of the drug. At UCSF, she led the Science Policy Group (SPG) and the Psychedelic and Entheogen Academic Council (PEAC) and joined the U.S. National Science Policy Network (NSPN). She served on several committees to facilitate international relations, diversity, and early career networking at the College on Problems of Drug Dependence (CPDD), the European Society of Prevention Research (EUSPR), the International AIDS Society (IAS), the International Society of Substance Use Professionals (ISSUP), the International Society for the Study of Drug Policy (ISSDP), the Society for Prevention Research (SPR), the Society of Addiction Psychology (APA Division 50), and the United Nations Associations of the USA SF Chapter (UNA-SF).