Dr. Gül Dölen is an associate professor of Neuroscience at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and is a leading researcher in the field of psychedelics. Her laboratory has found a new mechanism that could explain the wide range of therapeutic uses that psychedelics are currently being explored. They have also discovered a new critical period for social reward learning and demonstrated that this period can be reopened with psychedelic drugs like MDMA, LSD, psilocybin, ketamine, and ibogaine. Building on this finding, Dr. Dölen has proposed the idea that psychedelics could be the key to unlocking critical periods across the brain. To test this idea, she has launched a collaborative effort across the country to determine whether psychedelics can reopen critical periods for ocular dominance plasticity, bird song learning, anatomical plasticity in the barrel cortex, serotonergic neuronal regeneration, dendritic spinogenesis, and motor learning.