The winner of this year’s Schmeidler Outstanding Student Award is Pascal Michael. This annual award goes to a student who excels academically and makes early contributions to the field through conference presentations, research, or involvement in one or more of the organizations of the field, and/or who has overcome practical difficulties to study parapsychology.Â
Pascal received a BSc Hons (Aberdeen University) in Neuroscience and an MSc (University College London) in Clinical Mental Health Sciences. He is currently pursuing a PhD in Psychology at the University of Greenwich with Dr. David Luke, where his research encompasses the analysis of mystical-type human experiences, both psychopharmacological and spontaneous—specifically, the psychedelic (namely DMT) experience and the near-death experience (NDE). This is with a view to developing a formalized framework of thinking that the NDE is fundamentally an endogenous psychedelic episode, as indicated by its acute, long-term, and anomalous effects. As such, Pascal’s interests lie in the continuum of death—from the molecular to the humanistic, and from the transpersonal to the transcendent—and its eventual illumination of the nature of life.Â
