Edward F. Kelly, PhD

EDWARD F. KELLY is a Professor in the Division of Perceptual Studies (DOPS), Department of Psychiatry and Neurobehavioral Sciences, University of Virginia Health System. He received his Ph.D. in cognitive science from Harvard in 1971, and spent the next 15-plus years working mainly in experimental parapsychology in the Electrical Engineering Department at Duke, followed by a similar stint with a large neuroscience group at UNC-Chapel Hill where he carried out EEG and fMRI studies of human cortical adaptation to natural tactile stimuli. He returned full-time to psychical research in 2002, serving as lead author of three major works - Irreducible Mind (2007), Beyond Physicalism (2015), and Consciousness Unbound (2021) - which collectively identify the contours of an enhanced science-based worldview that can accommodate psychological and spiritual phenomena lying beyond the reach of contemporary mainstream physicalism. These “rogue” phenomena include, for example, the various forms of psi or psychic phenomena, manifestations of extreme psychophysical influence such as stigmata and hypnotic blisters, near-death experiences occurring under extreme physiological conditions such as deep general anesthesia and/or cardiac arrest, and indeed consciousness itself. He has more recently returned to his central long-term research interest – functional neuroimaging studies of psi and altered states in exceptional subjects – using a state-of-the-art laboratory facility created specifically for this purpose at DOPS.