Eirini is currently a PhD candidate at Exeter where she also coordinates the Transdisciplinary Psychedelic Colloquium. Her work at its core explores diversifying consciousness for flourishing (eudaimonia) and aims to balance polarizing narratives. She investigates how challenging perceptions of ‘Normality’ trigger mechanisms with layered impact on individual and collective potential for transformation.
Originally from Greece, Eirini completed her degree in Philosophy, Pedagogy and Psychology at Ioannina University. She then moved to the UK where she completed an MSc in Psychology of Education at UCL. After spending a few years in London as a Research Consultant for employee wellbeing, she moved to Exeter in 2019 to focus on academic research. Before her shift to psychedelic academia, she worked on projects studying socio-cognitive flexibility and the role of morality and social conventions in reasoning about exclusion across development.
She has also published a philosophical-psychological novel on the paradoxical quest to complete ‘the puzzle of reality’ (Gavrielides books, 2014). In To Pithano (The Possible/Probable), an amnesiac’s journey for answers is both guided and hindered by the storyteller voices of trauma, memory, and dreams. The protagonist’s questioning of his conviction in the reality of his waking consciousness underscores the challenge of defining one’s sanity.
Her ESRC-funded PhD with Celia Morgan and Leor Roseman looks at the pluripotency of psychedelic transformations through the lens of meaning making aiming to untangle the drivers behind individuals’ differential trajectories. In efforts to counteract the short-sighted hype surrounding the therapeutic benefits of psychedelics Eirini has joined Jules Evans’ Challenging Psychedelic Experiences Project as a Research Fellow.
With a background in philology, philosophy and education studies, she believes in the value of transcending disciplinary lenses in the study of diversifying experience and is invested in fostering creative collaborations through the Colloquium activities. In 2022 she led the Transdisciplinary Consciousness Conversers Researcher Led Initiative with Johanna Sopanen.
