Team | Alexander Shulgin Research Institute

ASRI Team

We have decades of experience designing, synthesizing, and characterizing psychedelics and other psychoactive agents.

We are uniquely positioned because we possess the Shulgin Vault of several hundred compounds previously synthesized by Sasha Shulgin and ASRI scientists. Many of these compounds are incompletely characterized or have unknown psychoactivity.

WORLD EXPERTS IN:

psychedelic drug design and synthetic chemistry
natural product isolation
detailed chemical analysis
in vitro identification of biological targets
in vivo assessment of drug activity in animals
design and execution of clinical research with human volunteers
drug formulation and delivery
legal, intellectual property, and patent abilities

Executive Team

Nicholas Vito Cozzi, B.S., Ph.D.
Founder

Paul Freeman Daley, B.S., M.S., Ph.D.
Founder

Dr. Cozzi is a distinguished scientist and educator with background and training in pharmacology, chemistry, toxicology, and neuroscience. He holds a Ph.D. in Pharmacology and a B.S. in Pharmacology and Toxicology, both from the prestigious University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Pharmacy. Dr. Cozzi has published numerous articles focused on the chemistry and neuropharmacology of psychoactive drugs and is internationally recognized for his work.

Dr. Cozzi’s research involves the design, chemical synthesis, and pharmacological testing of substances with central nervous system activity, especially those with psychedelic, antidepressant, or psychostimulant effects. He is interested in how these agents act in the brain to promote neuronal health, improve mood, enhance cognition, and increase awareness, and in their clinical value in treating addiction, depression, post-traumatic fear, neurological diseases, and other health ailments.

As an educator, Dr. Cozzi taught pharmacology at the Brody School of Medicine at East Carolina University, the UW-Madison School of Medicine and Public Health, and the UW-Madison School of Pharmacy. He is a frequent guest speaker at other academic institutions around the United States, reflecting his dedication to nurturing the next generation of health science professionals.

Dr. Cozzi has received several teaching and research awards, including a Distinguished Basic Science Teaching Award from the UW-Madison and an esteemed NARSAD Award from the Brain and Behavior Research Foundation for his work involving the serotonin uptake transporter. His research has also been supported by grants from the National Institutes of Health, the UW-Madison, and private foundations. Outside academia, Dr. Cozzi serves as a scientific consultant for legal, pharmaceutical industry, and government clients.

Dr. Cozzi collaborated with Dr. Shulgin from the mid-1980s until Sasha’s passing. During this period, they co-authored an influential series of research articles that were focused on the chemistry and pharmacology of psychedelics, empathogens, and psychostimulants. Dr. Cozzi is Co-Founder, President, and Director of Pharmacology at the Alexander Shulgin Research Institute in Lafayette, CA.

Dr. Daley is a scientist with a broad background in environmental sciences, chemistry, and plant physiology. His university degrees in Environmental Toxicology and Entomology were granted from the University of California Davis and Berkeley campuses. He has over sixty publications in integrated pest management, plant photosynthesis, environmental chemistry, analytical instrumentation, and the pharmacology of psychedelics. He has presented research findings on four continents in English, Spanish, and French.

Following his university work, focused on the environmental physiology of plant-insect interactions, Dr. Daley held a post-doctoral fellowship at the Université Laval in Québec, Canada, where he developed novel methods for measuring plant photosynthesis at the canopy level. He continued this work as a post doc, then as a career scientist at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California from 1984 to 2014. His initial work ranged from analysis of vegetation responses to elevated atmospheric carbon dioxide, visualization of in vivo photosynthesis via quantitative chlorophyll fluorescence imaging for detection of plant stress and disease, to development of fiber-optic chemical sensors for environmental pollutants. He also engineeried unattended pollution monitoring systems for the Army, and performed bioremediation analysis through measurement of stable isotopes and radiocarbon in soil gases for the US Navy. Dr. Daley developed a real-time interfacing system to couple between liquid chromatographs and large-scale accelerator mass spectrometers for radiocarbon detection for pharmaceutical applications. This latter work was supported by the National Institute of Health and patented in 2012. He has participated on SBIR grant review panels for the Department of Energy (environmental monitoring and remediation) and the Environmental Protection Agency (environmental impacts of nanomaterials).

Dr. Daley worked with Dr. Shulgin from 2007 until Sasha’s passing in 2014, restoring the Shulgin Laboratory, extending Shulgin’s work on psychoactive tryptamines, and co-authoring The Shulgin Index, Volume One: Psychedelic Phenethylamines and Related Compounds, published by Transform Press in 2011. He is Co-Founder, Chief Science Officer, and Chemist at the Alexander Shulgin Research Institute in Lafayette, CA, where his work focuses on the chemistry and analysis of psychostimulant and psychedelic drugs.