Sarah Mennenga

Dr. Sarah Mennenga earned her Bachelors, Masters, and Doctorate degrees from Arizona State University in 2010, 2012, and 2015, and completed 5 years of post-doctorate training at NYU Langone’s Grossman School of Medicine. Since then, she has held faculty positions at NYU Langone’s Center for Psychedelic Medicine and the School of Life Sciences at Arizona State University. She has over 15 years of experience in behavioral neuroscience research, and 10 years of experience studying the clinical and pre-clinical effects of psychedelics. At the NYU Langone Center for Psychedelic Medicine, Dr. Mennenga had a unique opportunity to contribute to some of the first modern clinical trials of psilocybin-assisted psychotherapy for addiction and cancer-associated anxiety and depression. Results from these and a handful of other trials established the safety and potential effectiveness of psilocybin treatment in psychiatry and paved the way for all modern clinical psychedelic research. Dr. Mennenga is also an expert in neuroendocrinology and the neurobiology of addiction, as well as cross-species translation. Her current research explores the mechanisms by which psychedelics affect cognition, anxiety-, and depressive-like behaviors in rodent models of stress and aging.