Amanda Feilding
Founder & Director, Beckley Foundation
Countess of Wemyss and March who founded the Beckley Foundation in 1998 and has spent three decades funding and facilitating psychedelic research partnerships that would not otherwise exist.
Biography
Amanda Feilding, Countess of Wemyss and March, founded the Beckley Foundation in 1998 with the mission of scientific research into psychedelics and drug policy reform. Operating from Beckley Park in England, the Foundation has functioned as a facilitator of research partnerships between academics who could conduct studies and benefactors who could fund them.
The Beckley-Imperial Research Programme, co-directed with Robin Carhart-Harris, produced some of the most cited psychedelic neuroscience of the 2010s — including the first LSD fMRI imaging studies and several psilocybin imaging papers.
Feilding has also partnered with the Global Drug Policy Commission and UN bodies to advocate for evidence-based drug policy reform, and has been involved in political advocacy in the United Kingdom, the European Union, and internationally.
She has a longstanding personal interest in trepanation and consciousness — a position that has been controversial but has not prevented the Foundation's scientific work from being productive.
The Beckley Foundation is distinct from MAPS and other US advocacy organizations in its European orientation and its particular focus on bridging the scientific, political, and cultural aspects of the psychedelic field simultaneously.
Organizations
Why They Matter to the LearnShrooms Community
The Beckley Foundation funded and facilitated Imperial College London's psychedelic neuroscience program at a time when no government funding was available. The Beckley-Imperial collaboration produced the field's most important neuroimaging studies. Feilding's decades of advocacy and relationship-building preceded the scientific acceptance that followed.
