MAPS Moves Forward With New Leadership Model
In a decision that brings a new model of leadership to an organization that has pioneered psychedelic-assisted therapy and policy reform, the board of directors of the nonprofit Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS) has named Betty Aldworth and Ismail Lourido Ali as co-executive directors.
Aldworth and Ali have been interim co-executive directors since April 2025 after Kris Lotlikar stepped down as executive director to become secretary of the MAPS Board of Directors. Lotlikar already held one of the seven MAPS board seats, which will remain intact during this transition. According to MAPS, founder and president, Rick Doblin, will continue to guide research initiatives and international projects.
Vicky Dulai, Chairperson of the MAPS Board of Directors, said in a statement that, “Betty and Ismail have demonstrated exceptional leadership during their interim tenure, seamlessly guiding MAPS through a critical period while maintaining our mission-driven focus. Their complementary skills, shared vision for psychedelic healing, and proven track record in movement building make them the ideal leadership team to advance MAPS’ strategic agenda in this pivotal moment for the psychedelic field.”
Doblin said that Aldworth and Ali will play a critical role in continuing the movement for legal, equitable access to psychedelics. He applauded what he said was their commitment to rigorous science, public education, and drug policy reform which “represent the strategic approach that makes MAPS so effective.”
“I really believe in empowered executive directors, because they’re closest to what’s going on, and they really understand the risks, the tradeoffs,” said Doblin during a webinar on September 9th that accompanied the announcement. Doblin also praised the MAPS Board of Directors, but noted that the future of the organization will largely depend on Aldworth and Ali in addition to his international initiatives. “I think the real success will hinge on the directors,” said Doblin.
The Next Chapter in MAPS History
Aldworth is the former Executive Director of Students for Sensible Drug Policy (SSDP) and serves as chair of the Board of Directors for the Marijuana Policy Project and MPP Foundation. She joined MAPS as director of communications and post-prohibition policy in 2020. Ali is an attorney who began at MAPS as a legal fellow in 2016 and is the organization’s former Director of Policy & Advocacy. He co-founded the Psychedelic Bar Association, and has designed and implemented drug policy reform around the world. Alworth and Ali have collaborated since 2016, and Ali was elected to chair the SSDP Board of Directors during Aldworth’s tenure.
In a joint statement, Aldworth and Ali said that, “As co-executive directors, we’re committed to leading MAPS and guiding the psychedelic ecosystem toward a safer, more compassionate, and more responsible post-prohibition future. Our paired leadership approach offers an exciting opportunity to play to our strengths, inspire collaborative solutions, and model the interdependent reality of our movement today. A multidisciplinary organization needs multidisciplinary leadership that can rise to today’s challenges — and we’re deeply honored to do so alongside our colleagues and community.”
Doblin says his collaboration with Ali and Aldworth is an intergenerational conversation that seeks to engage a rapidly changing field. “How we all work together has been terrific and I think what’s going on now is that we are really positioned for the next chapter in MAPS’s history,” said Doblin.
Under their leadership, Aldworth and Ali say that MAPS will reinforce its core research, drug policy and education initiatives while building community. MAPS would continue to advance public education resources about psychedelics, but Ali says the organization will hone in on resources for professionals in the field. He noted that MAPS created a crisis response training last year and has been expanding their international therapist education program.
As MAPS approaches its 40th anniversary in 2026, the organization is shifting to meet a rapidly changing psychedelic ecosystem. Aldworth and Ali say that while the MAPS board spent months looking at other potential candidates and leadership models, formalizing the co-executive director structure acknowledges that psychedelics is evolving to a place where a single leader cannot hold all the current complexities posed by research and policy issues.
“This model is just signaling the reality of what’s already happening, which is that we make decisions together, and that we get better decisions when we work together,” said Ali. He sees MAPS’s embrace of collaborative leadership as a reflection of the need to keep up with a field that continues to rapidly expand.
Doblin notes that after the FDA rejected a New Drug Application for MDMA-assisted therapy for PTSD in August 2024, some were concerned that the decision would create a chilling effect. On the contrary, Doblin says there has been more activity than expected in psychedelic policy reform. Over the years, MAPS has received many requests for technical input on psychedelic science and policy from advocacy groups, regulators, committees, legislators and their staff. Ali says MAPS is now carefully considering when to step in on issues such as state legislative initiatives and what specific support to provide.
According to Ali, MAPS is looking forward to supporting the implementation of new legislation regulating the use of psychedelics in New Mexico and closely watching developments in Washington, New York and Texas. “A lot of what we’re thinking about at MAPS is ‘what does it mean for us to focus,’ given that there are now dozens of organizations doing amazing work and that may be even better positioned, in many cases, than we are to do certain things,” says Ali. “So how do we build those partnerships?”
During the webinar, Aldworth said that MAPS will focus on empowering people to become agents for change in their own community. She said the organization also needs to do much more bridge-building with movements with which it shares interests. “That gets complex, because you have to figure out what are the areas of the work where we can accept a bit of compromise, but not compromise our values in order to build this bridge. Or do we have to stand firm in our values, build our part of the bridge, and wait for potential partners to be ready to build their part of the bridge back to us,” said Aldworth. “I think this is the biggest challenge for the movement.”
A Turbulent Year For MAPS
Negotiating shifting partnerships has been a major theme for MAPS since the FDA’s rejection of the New Drug Application for MDMA-assisted therapy for PTSD. The application was submitted by Lykos Therapeutics, which spun off from the for-profit MAPS Public Benefit Corporation in January 2024. The FDA decision came as a surprise to the MAPS nonprofit, which had expected to gain financially from its stake in Lykos. The FDA issued a Complete Response Letter (CRL) to Lykos stating that the data submitted were insufficient for approval and requested an additional costly Phase 3 study.
After the shock FDA decision, the MAPS nonprofit, which then held six board seats and was the largest shareholder of Lykos, cut 33% of its workforce. Aldworth says that the MAPS staff shrank from 44 to 29 people and has remained the same size since. The organization was forced to realign its budget and priorities away from projections that were made when planning for the application to be approved. In the months that followed, Doblin stepped down from the board of Lykos which laid off 100 people cutting its staff by 75% to prioritize resubmission of the application.
The CRL letter was finally made public by the FDA on September 4, alongside other documents intended to provide a view into the agency’s decision-making process. MAPS issued a statement in response to the release in which Doblin asserts that “the FDA moved the goalposts” and shifted its standards for double-blind studies “after the trials were complete and the application was accepted.”
Doblin says that MAPS welcomes the transparency of the CRL release and says it implies momentum towards a different relationship between the FDA and drug developers. He noted that Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., the Secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, supported accelerated development of psychedelic therapies during a House committee meeting in June.
“These are people who badly need some kind of therapy; nothing else is working for them,” Kennedy told members of Congress. “This line of therapeutics has tremendous advantage if given in a clinical setting. And we are working very hard to make sure that that happens within 12 months.”
While the FDA decides how it will handle the New Drug Application for MDMA-assisted therapy for PTSD, Lykos has continued to undergo significant changes. In late August 2025, Lykos Therapeutics rebranded itself as Resilient Pharmaceuticals Inc. after investors Antonio Gracias and Sir Chris Hohn capitalized the company with $50 million in Series B funding. The restructuring left the MAPS nonprofit with one board seat, one observer seat, and at least a 15 percent stake in Resilient.
Moving Towards the Future
Since MAPS was founded in 1986, the nonprofit organization has raised more than $150 million in funding from philanthropic donors and grantors. According to data from ProPublica, the organization had total revenue of $18.3 million in 2023, including a $5 million grant from the Steven & Alexandra Cohen Foundation. Information from ProPublica and the nonprofit watchdog site Charity Navigator shows that MAPS had a total of $14.1 million in expenses in 2023, the year that the Psychedelic Science conference attracted more than 12,000 attendees.
According to Aldworth, MAPS has raised about $3 million in 2025 towards its present $5 million funding goal. She said the staff has been stable since she and Ali stepped in and it’s not yet clear whether MAPS needs to grow as an organization towards their pre-FDA decision staffing. “I think there’s a lot that we can get done with our team, our partners and collaborators,” said Aldworth. “Izzy and I bring back in a groundedness, a long-standing understanding of the complexities of this field and organization, as well as a lot of trust and continuity within the organization.”
Ali notes that when MAPS was raising funds for expensive clinical research, the organization pursued a major donor strategy that “didn’t really build the base as much as we could have.” He said that in the past there were also fewer state-level psychedelic policy reforms where larger numbers of supporters mattered in terms of influencing politics or politicians. Now that Resilient Pharmaceuticals is focusing on the major drug development work in the U.S. that MAPS used to fund, Ali said MAPS can build a broad-based support system and expand its membership campaign.
According to Aldworth, one of the main goals of MAPS between now and its 40th anniversary next year is to spend time reevaluating the role of the organization within the psychedelic ecosystem that it helped create. She said that the 2025 Psychedelic Science conference, which attracted 8,000 participants, created momentum for MAPS and helped ground the organization after the FDA decision.
“A lot of the end of last year and the beginning of this year was really focused – on even before stability – just getting to a baseline after what felt like a very hard 2024 not just for MAPS, but for the movement in general,” said Ali. “With this shift kind of coming out of the momentum of psychedelic science – which I don’t think created the same kind of boost necessarily that people saw in the kind of hype machine of 2022 and 2023 – but did, in my opinion, lock in that sort of new stabilized place,” said Ali.
In a statement, Doblin said that as MAPS continues as a catalyst and convener for diverse voices at Psychedelic Science, Aldworth and Ali’s focus on inclusivity makes them ideal leaders to build “a post-prohibition world where people have legal and equitable access to psychedelics for healing, spirituality and personal growth.”
While MAPS has been successful in focusing on a particular pathway that embraces a medical model, Ali says the organization understands that there are other ways to create access and engage with indigenous and traditional practices of psychedelic healing. He emphasized that this must come from the perspective of equals and account for the harms of the past. “It’s a big task, not just for MAPS, but for the movement as a whole,” says Ali.
In their opening presentation at the 2025 Psychedelic Science conference, Ali and Aldworth acknowledged the tensions within the psychedelic movement, which continue to challenge MAPS and other organizations to examine their biases and assumptions.
“Are we talking about treatments or traditions? Are we talking about commercialization or communities? We’re talking about research or reciprocity?” said Ali. “I don’t necessarily think that these things are mutually exclusive or in opposition to each other, but understanding how these large themes culturally interact with one another is, I think, one of the big questions, one of the big responsibilities of the psychedelic movement going forward.”
Main image: Ali and Aldworth on stage with Doblin at the MAPS PS2025 closing plenary.