The Ancient Modern Institute works across science, traditional knowledge, medicine, culture, consciousness, and the systems that determine how knowledge moves through the world.
We investigate questions that often exist between established disciplines, including traditional medicine, consciousness, neuroscience, neuropsychopharmacology, ethnobotany, Indigenous knowledge systems, psychedelic medicines, and the cultural systems surrounding their use.
We exist to expand what we are capable of understanding.
Ancient Modern develops educational experiences that translate across disciplines, cultures, institutions, and systems of understanding, from university access and academic education to field learning, public scholarship, and direct knowledge exchange.
Knowledge can only change the world when people can access it.
Entire industries are emerging around medicines, practices, and knowledge that have existed within Indigenous and traditional communities for generations. How those industries are built matters. Ancient Modern develops models for reciprocity, Indigenous leadership, cultural sovereignty, community ownership, research ethics, and regenerative economics.
Ethics should not simply restrict a system after it has been built. It should determine how the system is built in the first place.
Learning moves in every direction
Where two healing systems meet
Research made into public conversation
Partner with the work directly
Abandoned as an infant in Kathmandu and adopted at two years old, I grew up moving across continents, cultures, languages, and radically different ways of understanding the world. My mother gave me an extraordinary childhood full of joy, travel, adventure, and curiosity, creating the conditions for me to experience the world with openness rather than limitation. Long before I had language for it, my life was already teaching me to think in systems.
That origin now sits at the center of my work. I move between neuroscience, psychedelic research, Indigenous knowledge systems, ethics, medicine, legislation, education, and institution building, with a particular interest in how these systems intersect, shape one another, and operate across cultures and borders.
At 16, I was admitted to Johns Hopkins University, where I now study neuroscience at 18. My long-term path is intentionally interdisciplinary: I plan to pursue an MD, JD, PhD, and MBA, ultimately training as a neurosurgeon while building fluency across medicine, law, research, and institutional leadership so I can work on complex systems from every level.
I have learned in laboratories and clinical settings, through fieldwork and traditional healing systems, alongside rural communities, and through relationships built across cultures. My work is ultimately an extension of the same question that has followed me throughout my life:
What becomes possible when different systems of knowledge, healing, science, culture, and governance learn to exist in reciprocal relationship with one another?
Biography for Michelle
Biography of Raquel
"The world becomes larger when we stop insisting there is only one way to know it."
– Pukar Nepal
