Early Life and Education
Rick Strassman was born in 1952 in Los Angeles, California. He grew up in the San Fernando Valley, attending public schools and graduating from Ulysses S. Grant High School in Van Nuys in 1969. He studied zoology at Pomona College before transferring to Stanford University, where he graduated with departmental honours in biological sciences in 1973. He received his medical degree with honours from the Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University in the Bronx, New York, in 1977.
Strassman completed his general psychiatry residency at the University of California, Davis, and went on to a clinical psychopharmacology research fellowship at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD). During the UCSD fellowship, he developed expertise in the pharmacology of the pineal gland and its hormone melatonin -- a line of research that would eventually lead him to DMT.
