This post originally appeared in Quantified Citizen CEO Eesmyal Santos-Brault's LinkedIn page.
How to publish in a prestigious science journal without a PhD:
1. Get curious about scientific research and propose your own citizen science study. For my buddy Kalin Harvey and I, it was about psychedelic #microdosing.
2. Teach yourself about clinical research and build an MVP app for democratizing health research. (NBD, huh?)
3. Passionately share your idea with the world and find collaborators like Sonia Brodie, Pamela Kryskow, Paul Stamets, Zach Walsh to make it better.
4. Decide to incorporate a new startup in a domain you have no experience in and don’t pay yourself for the next 2 years.
5. Write your first academic research protocol and ethics application, with lots of support from your collaborators
6. Inspire one of the most inspiring men in the world, Paul Stamets to share your idea on the Joe Rogan Experience.
7. Freak out and pull many favours and many all-nighters because now you have to build the real thing because the world is watching.
8. Have babies while you’re doing this, because you don’t have enough on your plate already.
9. Raise your first investment round because you don’t have deep enough pockets to frantically hire all the staff needed to pull this off in time.
10. Launch your new product and hope the world likes it.
11. Spend the next 2 years tirelessly refining your product with input from users and early customers.
12. Amaze yourself that over 14,500 people joined your psychedelic microdosing study.
13. Support your research team in writing a scientific paper and submit it to the most prestigious journal in the world, Nature.
14. Celebrate because you fucking did it, and became an official co-author in a paper about the very idea that started it all!
