The Heifets Laboratory
Welcome to the Heifets Lab
Our research group is dedicated to understanding and improving on powerful, rapid-acting therapies for psychiatric disease, such as ketamine, MDMA and psilocybin. We bridge basic science and clinical trials, connecting neuroscience, psychiatry and anesthesiology in pursuit of highly effective, safe treatment strategies scalable to the millions of patients who need them.
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A new review suggests that MDMA may help people feel safer, more connected, and more open during psychotherapy. These effects may make it easier to explore difficult experiences and emotions that are often part of trauma recovery.
Source: https://bit.ly/4cwMwaj
The long-standing view that ketamine is simply an NMDA receptor antagonist has been progressively and fundamentally reshaped by a series of recent studies that have collectively redefined our understanding of how ketamine and its enantiomers act therapeutically but also why it
nice backyard dinner to honor our recent neuroanesthesiology fellowship graduates (Drs Moi Arriaga & Hanan Baker) & to welcome our new incoming fellows Drs Sophia Canavan & July Montoya:
1/6 🍄 What happens in the brain under psilocybin?
I’m excited to share our new preprint:
“Brain-wide reconfiguration of burst firing by psilocybin reveals 5-HT2A-dependent circuit dynamics.”
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.08.14.744865v1
#Psilocybin #Psychedelics #Neuroscience #OpenScience
Applications are open! We have an *incredible* lineup of speakers at the 2027 GRC/GRS on Consciousness, Anesthesia and Evolutionary Biology - January 17-22, 2027 SoCal. Keynotes by Christof Koch, @doristsao (GRC) and @mattlark (GRS). see link below for the prelim program -
GRC here: https://www.grc.org/consciousness-anesthesia-and-evolutionary-biology-conference/2027/
Trainees- dedicated 2 day pre-meeting GRS: https://www.grc.org/consciousness-anesthesia-and-evolutionary-biology-grs-conference/2027/
Excited to be on NPR!
Embarrassed to have called psilocybin a metabolite!
You win some, you lose some!
1/16 Our work is now published in @Nature.
The psychedelic brain is often described as desynchronised or entropically disordered. That is true, but incomplete.
Beneath the apparent disorder, we found structured brain activity aligned with context.
Psychedelics align brain activity with context
Nature - The psychedelic psilocybin reorganizes brain activity into structured, context-aligned patterns that integrate in...
www.nature.com
1/6 Thrilled to share our paper in @npp_journal! 🎉 This work was led by outstanding first author, graduate student Chase Carter, in collaboration with @LabWalsh.
We asked how high-fat diet exposure reshapes brain-wide activity and palatable food intake.
Brain-wide activity mapping reveals the somatosensory cortex as a sex-specific regulator of hedonic...
Neuropsychopharmacology - Brain-wide activity mapping reveals the somatosensory cortex as a sex-specific regulator of hedonic feeding
www.nature.com