Ceyda Sayalı, PhD

Ceyda Sayalı, PhD, is an Assistant Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences and a faculty member at the Center for Psychedelic and Consciousness Research at Johns Hopkins University. She is a cognitive neuroscientist whose research investigates the neurocognitive and neurophysiological mechanisms underlying the acute and enduring effects of psychedelics, with the broader goal of understanding how these compounds produce lasting changes in cognition, mood, and behavior.

Dr. Sayalı earned B.A. degrees in Psychology and Philosophy from Koç University in Turkey and completed her PhD at Brown University, where she studied the neural mechanisms of cognitive control. She subsequently completed a postdoctoral fellowship at Radboud University in the Netherlands focused on the psychopharmacology of cognitive control.

Her current research integrates functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), electroencephalography (EEG), and transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) to investigate both correlational and causal mechanisms of brain function. A central focus of her research program is understanding how psychedelics alter neural systems supporting cognitive control and how these changes contribute to persistent therapeutic effects. Her work combines pharmacological interventions with targeted brain stimulation and multimodal measures of brain function to test mechanistic hypotheses and develop novel interventions for psychiatric conditions, including alcohol use disorder. She leads research examining psychedelic–brain stimulation combinations, including NIH-funded work investigating personalized brain stimulation together with psilocybin for alcohol use disorder.