Natasha Mason is an assistant professor at the department of Neuropsychology and Psychopharmacology at Maastricht University. Her research is driven by her desire to find effective treatments for psychiatric disorders, particularly anxiety, depression, and post-traumatic stress disorder. There is ever-growing evidence that substances such as psychedelic drugs and cannabis provide rapid and persisting symptomatic relief. Her question has always been “how”: how do these substances work (to reduce symptoms), and how can we maximize efficacy of these substances, while reducing harms. In pursuit of these research goals, she conducts placebo-controlled, experimental drug trials. Here, she combines methods from psychopharmacology and cognitive neuroscience to determine drug-induced neuroadaptations, and their impact on affect, behavior, and cognition. To complement this work, she also conducts naturalistic field work and survey studies. Here, she gathers data from large samples of drug users, gaining real-word insights into their experiences, to inform the development of new hypotheses which can be tested in experimental trials.