Helena Hansen, an MD, Ph.D. psychiatrist-anthropologist, is Professor and Interim Chair of Psychiatry and Interim Director of the Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior at UCLA. She is an internationally recognized leader in social medicine, and in biosocial research that illuminates the mechanisms by which social environment drives mental health outcomes. She is the author of over 100 articles in leading clinical and social science journals, and of three books: Addicted to Christ: Remaking Men in Puerto Rican Pentecostal Drug Ministries; Structural Competency in Medicine and Mental Health: A Case-Based Approach to Treating the Social Determinants of Health (with Jonathan Metzl); and Whiteout: How Racial Capitalism Changed the Color of Opioids in America (with Jules Netherland and David Herzberg), which won the 2023 New Millennium Book Award from the American Anthropological Association and the 2024 Rachel Carson Prize from the Society for the Social Study of Science. She has received numerous other awards, including an honorary doctorate from Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York, and election to the National Academy of Medicine.
Currently she is co-founder and director of the Ecological Medicine and Psychedelic Studies Initiative, an international trans-disciplinary network of researchers and practitioners that is developing the clinical field of Ecological Medicine to remedy disconnection among humans, non-human species, and the natural environment.