Scientific Team

 Roger Nelson, Ph.D.

sized_r_nelsonDirector, Global Consciousness Project (GCP). Roger Nelson is a cognitive scientist whose primary interests are at the frontiers of consciousness research. He was Coordinator of Research at the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research (PEAR) laboratory, Princeton University, from 1980 to 2002, and he has directed the Global Consciousness Project (GCP), since its inception in 1997. Broad interests in psychology, physics, philosophy, and the arts have provided opportunities to collaborate with creative interdisciplinary teams at PEAR and elsewhere, working on subtle questions at the boundaries of our knowledge. Dr. Nelson’s work focuses on intention and consciousness in “psi” research, looking at anomalous non-local communication and interactions of mind with physical systems.

In 1993, building on years of laboratory experiments, Dr. Nelson began using random event generator (REG) technology in field studies at meetings, concerts, rituals, and ceremonies. The results indicated that random data may show patterns in response to coherent states of group consciousness. This work led naturally to the GCP, which is designed to register indications of a coalescing global consciousness responding to major world events such as 9/11, the beginning of a war, or New Year’s Eve. Dr. Nelson is both the director and the primary analyst for this continuous running experiment. As of the end of 2005, the results for a series of over 200 formal tests during the past seven years show a small but significant correlation with major events. The analyses reveal trends and patterns in data that should be random, and the patterns are related to events of importance to humans, including both disasters and celebrations. Speculative interpretations of the results suggest that we may be looking at some form of consciousness field.

Dr. Nelson’s present work is a continuation and expansion of the Global Consciousness Project. He is complementing the scientific work with talks and articles that focus on applications. The GCP data and analyses provide evidence for meaningful interactions of consciousness with the physical world. This implies a creative role for mind and intention in determining the way things are and in defining our future.


Dean Radin, Ph.D.

sized_radin13smallSenior Scientist, Institute of Noetic Sciences (IONS). Dean Radin, earned a BSEE magna cum laude in electrical engineering from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and both an MS in electrical engineering and a PhD in psychology from the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana. For ten years, he was a member of the technical staff at AT&T Bell Laboratories and later a principal scientist at GTE Laboratories, where he was engaged in R&D on a wide variety of advanced telecommunications products and systems. For fifteen years, Dr. Radin has conducted experimental studies of psi phenomena in academia and industry, including appointments at Princeton University, University of Edinburgh, University of Nevada, and SRI International, the latter as a visiting scientist on a classified program of psi research. Before joining IONS, he cofounded the Boundary Institute and was in charge of a psi research program at Interval Research Corporation in Palo Alto, California.

Dr. Radin was elected president of the Parapsychological Association, an affiliate of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), in 1988, 1993, 1998, and 2005. He also served as a counselor in the Society for Scientific Exploration from 1986 to 1994, and was program chair for the Society’s annual meetings in 1987 and 1997.

Dr. Radin’s research awards include the Parapsychological Association’s Outstanding Achievement Award and the Rhine Research Center’s Alexander Imich Award for advances in experimental parapsychology. He has earned Special Merit Awards from GTE Laboratories and Bell Labs. He has received grants from the Richard Hodgson Memorial Fund Grant at Harvard University, the Bial Foundation in Portugal, the Parapsychology Foundation in New York, the Society for Psychical Research in London, the Swedish Society for Psychical Research in Stockholm, the Institute for Border Areas of Psychology in Germany, and the Bigelow Foundation in Las Vegas.

Dr. Radin has been interviewed about his research for feature stories in The New York Times Magazine, Psychology Today, Newsweek, and New Scientist, and he has given dozens of invited lectures around the world. Radin is author of the award-winning book, The Conscious Universe (1997, HarperCollins), Entangled Minds (2006, Simon & Schuster), and is author or coauthor of over 200 journal articles and technical reports.


Mikel Aickin, Ph.D., Chief Statistician
Mikel Aickin is Research Professor, Department of Family & Community Medicine and Program in Integrative Medicine at the University of Arizona. Dr. Aickin has more than 35 years of experience as a biostatistician collaborating with researchers in a wide variety of areas in biomedicine, including cancer prevention, cancer genetics, public health, dietary assessment, dietary intervention, bone mineral measurement and exercise/diet intervention, weight loss intervention, blood pressure intervention, chiropractic intervention, mechanistic studies of acupuncture, and life-style behavior modification.

Dr. Aickin has been biometry core leader on program projects in cancer prevention and control, and CAM treatments for temporomandibular joint disorder. He has been director of biometry at the Arizona Cancer Center, as well as at the University of Arizona Medical Center. He is currently working in several areas, including causal analysis, compartmental modeling, design of early-phase CAM research studies, and applications of dynamic systems theory to biomedicine. In addition to collaborations with a wide variety of researchers, Dr. Aickin has completed methodology projects on the effectiveness of strategies of searching MedLine, causal analysis of breast cancer incidence, and a novel statistical method for co-occurrences of events having applications ranging from causal disease models to analysis of genomic/proteomic microarray data.

Dr. Aickin is currently researching alternatives to randomization and intent-to-treat analysis in clinical trials. He is Associate Editor of The Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine, and writes a regular column on inference for the Journal of Scientific Exploration, where he is on the editorial board.


Jay Herson, Ph.D.
sized_hersonJay Herson received his Ph.D. in Biostatistics from Johns Hopkins in 1971. Dr. Herson’s first positions after graduation were at the National Center for Health Statistics in Rockville, MD and the Howard University College of Medicine in Washington, DC. In 1976 he moved to Houston to work as a biostatistician on cancer clinical trials at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center and the Southwest Oncology Group.

In 1983 he formed Applied Logic Associates, a contract research organization in Houston. ALA provided data management, biostatistical and regulatory services on clinical trials for pharmaceutical, biotechnology and medical device firms. About 60% of services were delivered to emerging biotech firms working in oncology. However firms working in internal medicine and ophthalmology benefited through ALA’s transfer of sophisticated statistical methods developed for in cancer research. At the time that ALA was sold to Westat, Inc. Rockville, MD in 2001 there were 50 ALA employees in Houston. Under his leadership ALA was able to participate in the approval of many critical care products in oncology, cardiovascular disease and ophthalmology.

Dr. Herson moved to Chevy Chase, MD in 2003 to work out of the corporate office of Westat. His relationship with that company ended at the end of 2005. During the past 30 years he has developed methods for design and analysis of clinical trials with planned interim analyses and sample size re-estimation. He organized and chaired the first data monitoring committee in the pharmaceutical industry and helped FDA draft a guidance document on data monitoring committees. Dr. Herson is a regular attendee at FDA Advisory Committee meetings and reports regularly on trends in FDA policy and pharmaceutical company presentations. He has numerous publications in the medical and statistical journals and has made numerous presentations at statistical meetings.

Dr Herson now works as a consultant or data monitoring committee member for several pharmaceutical, biotech and medical device firms. Serving as Senior Associate in Biostatistics at Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore he teaches in several graduate courses and works on various research projects. He volunteers weekly as a tutor in English as a Second Language and news reader for the blind.Dr. Herson’s second career is that of a futurist. He has written articles on the future of the pharmaceutical industry and scenarios for the coming osteoporosis epidemic. He serves as Senior Associate at the Institute for Alternative Futures, Alexandria, VA where he works with staff on future scenarios in areas such as pharmaceutical R&D and education. He is also Managing Editor and frequent contributor to the newsletter Future Takes.


Jonathan W. Schooler, Ph.D., Social Scientist
Professor of psychology at the University of California at Santa Barbara, Jonathan W. Schooler pursues research on consciousness, memory, the relationship between language and thought, problem-solving, and decision-making. Currently he is particularly interested in exploring phenomena that intersect between the empirical and the philosophical such as how fluctuations in people’s awareness of their experience mediate mind-wandering and how exposing individuals to philosophical positions alters their behavior.

A cum laude graduate of Hamilton College where he was elected to Sigma Xi, he earned a Ph.D. in psychology at the University of Washington in 1987. Dr. Schooler joined the psychology faculty of the University of Pittsburgh as an assistant professor that same year and became a research scientist at Pittsburgh’s Learning Research and Development  Center. Named a full professor in 2001, he moved on to the University of British Columbia (UBC) in 2004 as professor of psychology, holder of a Canada Research Chair in Social Cognitive Science, and senior investigator at UBC’s Brain Research Centre. He accepted his present position last year. Dr. Schooler has been a visiting professor at University of Virginia and a visiting scholar at the University of Washington.

A fellow of the Association for Psychological Science, he has been the recipient of three Akumal Scholar Awards from the Positive Psychology Network, an Osher Fellowship given by the Exploratorium Science Museum in San Francisco, and a Lilly Foundation Teaching Fellowship. His work has been supported by the National Institute of Mental Health, the University of Pittsburgh, the Unilever Corporation, the Center for Consciousness Studies, the Office of Educational Research, the Canada Foundation for Innovation, Canada’s Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, the National Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, the Canadian Institute for Health Research, the Bial Foundation, and the Bower Foundation. He currently is on the editorial boards of Consciousness and Cognition and Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience. Dr. Schooler is the author or co-author of more than one hundred papers published in scientific journals and the editor (with J.C. Cohen) of Scientific Approaches to Consciousness, which was published in 1997 by Lawrence Erlbaum.