Gideon Naudé, PhD

Gideon Naudé, Ph.D., is a Research Associate in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. He earned his doctorate in Behavioral Psychology at the University of Kansas with an emphasis on behavioral and neuroeconomic models of motivation and reward, and completed postdoctoral training in behavioral pharmacology and psychedelic science at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine before joining the faculty. His research interests broadly encompass the tradeoff between environmental costs (e.g., time, money, effort) and lifestyle choices that lead to chronic disease and mortality. Behavioral economics provides a framework for quantifying how persistently a reward is pursued as its costs mount. That persistence is central to substance use disorders, and it has rarely been measured directly in psilocybin trials. Ongoing research is aimed at evaluating psilocybin as a therapeutic adjunct for tobacco and cannabis use disorders, and developing behavioral economic tools (e.g., demand and discounting assessments) to classify risk across patterns of polysubstance use, predict treatment outcomes, and track change following treatment.