Estrella V. Castillo, BA, MPhil, AA

Estrella V. Castillo is a Ph.D. candidate in Yale’s Program in the History of Science and Medicine whose research examines Indigenous ceremonial medicines, psychedelic science, and the regulatory boundaries between religion and medicine. Her dissertation focuses on peyote across the United States and Mexico, analyzing how legal, medical, and scientific institutions have classified peyote as sacrament, controlled substance, Indigenous medicine, cultural practice, and psychedelic compound.

Castillo’s work builds on historical and participant-observation field research to develop frameworks for understanding healing practices that do not fit neatly within modern distinctions between religion, therapy, pharmacology, and cultural tradition. Her research asks how Indigenous ceremonial authorities have sustained forms of care amid environmental precarity, criminalization, conservation crisis, and the uneven expansion of psychedelic medicine. It also examines how contemporary psychedelic-assisted therapy might be rethought when placed in relation to longer histories and co-contributions across Indigenous healing, land-based medicine, and Indigenous and non-Indigenous ceremonial healing expertises.

Her medical-facing work includes the Yale School of Medicine/RebPsych Conference panel presentation “Peyote Protagonista”: The Promises and Perils of Psychedelics—Social Justice Perspectives (2020), a History of Science Society conference presentation “Psychedelicizing Peyote” (2022), and more recently a 2026 OSU Psychedelics & Religion Conference presentation that she is drafting as an article for publishing: "Beyond Recognition: The Illegibility of Peyote Under Secular Law"–on the peyote diaspora and North and Central American land-based healing continuities/discontinuities, authoritative doctoring, psychedelic science, and the secular-religious divide.