I love photographing a healthcare symposium. It’s always interesting because I usually (at best) have a cursory knowledge of the topic. But I love hearing brilliant people talk. Especially when it’s about things they are truly passionate about. It’s one of the many advantages of this job. So it was a delight when I had the opportunity to attend a healthcare symposium about psychedelics.
Year of Psychedelics
The 38th annual symposium — titled “MINS Year of Psychedelics” — was held at Penn Medicine‘s Smilow Center for Translational Research. Our good friends at the Mahoney Institute for Neurosciences (MINS) enlisted us to document the entire experience. With lectures like ‘Psychedelics: Brain Mechanisms’ and ‘The Neuropsychopharmacology of Psychedelic Drugs’ it was clearly going to be a good one.
The symposium brought together people from all over the country. The focus was the use of psychedelics for treatment of anxiety, depression, PTSD, and more. The day included a lineup of expert speakers diving deep into their research.
After that, attendees moved to an epic poster session. Here, people conversed at their own pace, among an array of topics. Fields such as Light Automated Pain Evaluation and others were on display, with presenters explaining and answering questions about their chosen field of study.
It’s always exciting to know that Philly is represented in these things, too. According to the literature from the event, “At Penn, a diversity of faculty across schools and in collaboration with other institutions, have engaged in the research of the neurobiological mechanisms of action of psychedelic compounds and their resulting long lasting effects on brain function.”
Thank you to MINS and Penn Medicine for letting us be a fly on the wall for this healthcare symposium. It will be exciting to see where some of this research ends up leading.
As always, if you are reading this and you have a conference or event coming up, reach out! Let’s talk about working together.
