2026 Ferriss-UC Berkeley Journalism Fellows
Copenhagen, Denmark
Lisa Abend
Lisa Abend is a freelance journalist who writes on European culture, politics, and science for The New York Times, TIME, Vanity Fair, and Undark. She is also the author of The Sorcerer's Apprentices: A Season in the Kitchen of Ferran Adrià's elBulli. For the fellowship, she will report on a Europe-wide project investigating the effects of psychedelic treatment on the mental health of patients facing a range of terminal diagnoses.
U.S. & Chile
Annie Avilés
Annie Avilés writes about rural lands and subcultures. She's made longform stories for The Atlantic, Harper’s, VQR, Vice, and others. Most recently, she was a Habitat for Humanity fellow in Chile, studying the role of traditional knowledge in disaster recovery. Annie started her career reporting for NPR from South America, covering land and natural resources. She later co-created Vice Audio, where she was part of the team that earned a Murrow for coverage of the fentanyl crisis. Today, in addition to reporting, she makes The Sticks, a newsletter that looks at the future of rural places. For the fellowship, Annie will focus on a movement in the Amazon to regulate ayahuasca.
Newsletter, Bluesky, X
New York & Ukraine
Amanda Bailly
Amanda Bailly is an independent journalist and award-winning documentary filmmaker who focuses on the people at the center of conflict and human rights crises around the world. Her work is intimate and character-driven, revealing the strength of ordinary people in the face of war, political violence, and displacement. Over the past four years, she has reported extensively on the war in Ukraine, where she is currently in post-production on a feature-length documentary. For the fellowship, she will be following Ukrainian veterans turning to ketamine-assisted psychotherapy as a path to healing.
Instagram: @amandabailly
New York, New York
Gabriela Barzallo
Gabriela Barzallo is a bilingual journalist from Ecuador based in New York City, reporting across Latin America. She is pursuing a Master’s in International Affairs at The New School. Her work focuses on human rights, environmental justice, migration, and inter-American politics, bridging journalism and international affairs to connect regional reporting with global policy conversations. She is a contributor to international outlets in English and Spanish, including The Guardian, El País, and Al Jazeera. She has received fellowships from organizations including the International Women’s Media Foundation, The Uproot Project, the Solutions Journalism Network, One World Media, and Johns Hopkins FPPN.
For this fellowship, she is reporting on the emergence of psychedelic therapy in Ecuador, examining how ancestral medicine and Western psychiatry are being integrated into new models of mental healthcare and what this may signal for Latin America.
Instagram, LinkedIn
Brooklyn, New York
Sophie Haigney
Sophie Haigney is a writer based in Brooklyn. Her journalism and essays have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, Harper’s, New York Magazine, and many other publications. Her first book, Future Relics, a collection of essays about collecting, is forthcoming in 2027. For four years, she was the online editor at The Paris Review, where she is now an advisory editor, and she has taught writing at Yale. For the fellowship, she is reporting on growing tensions around psychedelic use in Alcoholics Anonymous and other recovery programs—and what this can tell us about how sobriety in America is changing.
X: @SophieHaigney
Oakland, California
Hussain Khan
Hussain Khan is a journalist focused on community-centered reporting and narrative audio storytelling. His work covers housing, immigration, and local policy, with a focus on how national issues shape everyday lives. He has reported and produced stories for KQED, KALW, and the Investigative Reporting Program. In 2025, Khan earned a master's degree from the UC Berkeley School of Journalism.
Khan began his journalism career in Canada, where he hosted and produced a narrative podcast on Muslim inmates and prison chaplains recognized at the Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival. At UC Berkeley, he reported on Gaza protest encampments and Palestinian students with family in Gaza. He later trained at the Transom Traveling Workshop and was selected for AIR New Voices 2024. His work on The California Report Magazine contributed to a SPJ NorCal Award 2025 for Best Arts & Culture Audio/Podcast.
For the fellowship, he is reporting on how racial inequities in clinical research, access, and care are shaping the future of psychedelic-assisted therapy, and what that means for Black patients as the field expands.
Instagram, LinkedIn
Asheville, North Carolina
Andrew Lawler
Andrew Lawler is a journalist and author who has written about history, science, religion, cultural heritage and politics. His byline has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, National Geographic, Smithsonian, and many other publications. He is a contributing writer for Science and contributing editor for Archaeology, as well as a National Geographic Explorer and a Pulitzer Center grantee. He is the recipient of several journalism awards and his work appeared in The Best of Science and Nature Writing. He also has written four books, including the prize-winning Under Jerusalem: The Buried History of the World’s Most Contested City. Andrew’s fellowship will focus on recent archaeological finds in the Andes Mountains which are shedding new light on ayahuasca, DMT, and other mind-altering substance use in the evolution of pre-Incan societies.
LinkedIn, Facebook
Los Angeles, California
Michelle Lhooq
Michelle Lhooq is an independent journalist and chronicler of the radical underground. She writes gonzo dispatches from the global frontiers of psychedelics and rave scenes in her newsletter, Rave New World—tracking how counterculture is evolving in an era of major paradigm shifts, rising authoritarianism, and algorithmic hegemony. Previously, she was a features editor at VICE covering electronic music, and a contributing editor reporting on psychedelic news and culture at DoubleBlind magazine. She is the author of Weed: Everything You Want to Know But Are Always Too Stoned to Ask, and her writing has also appeared in New York Magazine, The Guardian, Bloomberg, The Los Angeles Times, and GQ. Lhooq's work is interested in liminality, communal modes of resistance, new drug trends, and the politics of pleasure; previous stories include a post-colonial history of Goa trance, the science of GMO weed, climate protestors at Burning Man, and a post-cringe theory of psychedelic spirituality. For the fellowship, she is writing about how an ascendant network of conservative-leaning, yet counterculturally-coded disruptors in Austin, Texas are reframing psychedelics for a new generation.
Instagram: @michellelhooq
Berkeley, California
Lakshmi Sarah
Lakshmi Sarah is an educator and journalist with a focus on creative storytelling. She has worked with newspapers, radio and magazines from Ahmedabad, India to Los Angeles, California. With a passion for experimental innovative projects, she has developed curriculum for journalists in immersive storytelling, and has taught at the UC Berkeley School of Journalism and Berkeley’s Advanced Media Institute. Her work has appeared in AJ+, KQED, Die Zeit Online and The New York Times. She is a co-author of Crafting Stories for Virtual Reality (Routledge, 2018) and is currently a lecturer in the UC Berkeley Geography Department. Sarah received a master's degree from the UC Berkeley School of Journalism in 2016. She’ll be pursuing a story on medical oversight and ethical use amidst a growing effort to understand the power of psychedelic medicine when mixed with modern psychology.
Instagram, Bluesky, LinkedIn
New Delhi, India
Jyoti Thakur
Jyoti Thakur is an independent journalist based in New Delhi, India, whose work focuses on science, tech, health, climate, and social justice. She has contributed to over a dozen media outlets, including Scientific American, NPR, BBC, Nikkei Asia, The Guardian, Deutsche Welle, and Al Jazeera among others. She has received 13th Laadli Media Awards from Population First and UNFPA in recognition of her gender-sensitive reporting for her work on how climate change is worsening water woes for women in India. For this fellowship, Jyoti is reporting on the growing use of AI chatbots as trip sitters during psychedelic experiences and its implications for mental health in India.
LinkedIn