Meet Our Team
David Fascinato
Executive Director
David is the Executive Director of Heroic Hearts Canada. With expertise in building and scaling organizations and their programs, he joined the team in late 2020 to lead and establish Heroic Hearts in Canada. Previously, David has worked in a variety of roles in the non-profit, public, and private sectors, including several years scaling a US-based disaster relief organization’s business model into new markets in Europe and Asia. David also spent ten years in the Canadian Armed Forces and deployed to Kandahar in 2010.
After several years working in the veteran transition space, he co-founded Team Rubicon Canada and today continues his work to support veterans in their transition from the military through Heroic Hearts Canada. David holds a Master of Design in Strategic Foresight and Innovation from OCAD University. He resides in Toronto with his spouse and two young children.
Yuriy Blokhin
Director
Yuriy Blokhin is a proud Ukrainian living in Canada and is the CEO and Founder of Homecoming. Yuriy is also a founding board member of Heroic Hearts Project and the Ukrainian Psychedelic Research Association. He is passionate about increasing safe access to psychedelic-assisted therapy to help all people, especially veterans around the world.
He studied mathematical physics at the University of Waterloo, but dropped out to start working at Kik as its first employee. It eventually became one of the most popular mobile apps globally (300m registered users). He is now studying part-time towards a liberal arts degree in religion and philosophy at Harvard Extension School.
Patrick Moher
Director
Amplifying impact as a dynamic and socially conscious entrepreneur, Patrick uses his creativity and passion for human connectivity/happiness to unite individuals across social and corporate spectrums. Evolving from a successful career in photography, and co-founding several cannabis companies, Patrick’s focus is helping businesses achieve financial success while supporting non-profits & charities in emerging industries.
Currently President at Microdose Psychedelic Insights, he’s developing the organization into the industry’s premier events and media platform alongside a highly motivated and engaged start up team.
Arron Victory
Director
Arron is a purpose-built entrepreneur and corporate strategy leader, Canadian Armed Forces veteran and advocate with robust experience in healthcare, emerging markets and stakeholder engagement. He is the co-founder and Chief Strategy Officer for Apex Labs, a pharmaceutical company focused on developing date-supported, clinically evaluated psychedelic treatments derived treatments for veterans.
Arron is also an ambassador for Wounded Warriors Canada, board member for Heroic Hearts Project and an advisory board member for the Chronic Pain Centre of Excellence, a research centre improving the understanding of veteran specific chronic pain.
Jesse Gould
Director
Jesse Gould is a pioneer in psychedelic therapies. As Founder and President of the Heroic Hearts Project USA, he has spearheaded the research and acceptance of ayahuasca, ibogaine, ketamine, and psilocybin therapy programs for military veterans. Jesse has connected hundreds of veterans to psychedelic treatments, partnered with the world’s leading psychedelic centers, and is researching psychiatric applications with the University of Colorado Boulder, the University of Georgia, the University of Texas, Austin Dell Medical School, and Imperial College
of London.
His mission is to help military veterans struggling with mental trauma and spread awareness of the benefits that psychedelic therapies offer as an alternative treatment to pharmaceuticals. Jesse has spoken globally about the benefits of psychedelics on mental health and has been featured in the New York Times, the New Yorker, the Economist, and Forbes and is recognized as one of the most influential voices in psychedelics today.
Our Clinical Advisory Group
The Clinical Advisory Group and its members inform Heroic Hearts Canada's evidence-based approach to designing, implementing, and measuring our programming impact. In line with existing medical standards, the Clinical Advisory Group exists to ensure our organization is transparent and compliant with current best practices to ensure our programs model the highest standard of care for our program participants. With a focus on ensuring safe and effective access for veterans, as well as ethical approaches to gathering data, supporting research, and providing education resources, the Clinical Advisory Group adds a layer of clinical, scientific, and academic oversight to Heroic Hearts Canada's programs and initiatives.
Olga Chernoloz, PhD
As a trained neuropharmacologist and a registered pharmacist, Dr. Olga Chernoloz has held several roles in clinical trial management, drug development, biotech, and pharmaceutics. Olga is a specialist in the pharmacology of psychoactive compounds, and provides scientific advisory to companies in cannabinoid and psychedelic space. She is also a scientific advisor to Psychedelics Studies Research Group at the University of Toronto, and has developed a program for Continued Medical Education in Psychedelic Medicine and a Neuroscience of Psychedelics course for University of Ottawa.
Olga is interested in the therapeutic potential of psychoactive drugs in the treatment of mental health disorders and the improvement of quality of life in healthy individuals. She is perusing structured clinical research on psychedelic micro and macro-dosing. She also authored several original research articles and a chapter in an instructional book on Neurobiology of Mood Disorders. Looking to help her home country of Ukraine, Olga is working on initiative that would enable legal use of psychedelic-assisted therapy for trauma and other conditions.
Houman Farzin, MD
Dr. Houman Farzin is a Palliative Care and Family Medicine physician at the Jewish General Hospital in Montreal. He has a broad range of clinical skills and has worked in remote indigenous communities across North America up to the Arctic Circle. He is trained in various psychedelic therapeutic modalities including MDMA, psilocybin, and ketamine. He is a trainer and member of the training committee for TheraPsil, a non-profit organization dedicated to obtaining legal access to psilocybin-assisted psychotherapy. He was also the Montreal site physical examiner for MAPPUSX, a multi-site open-label extension study of MDMA-assisted psychotherapy for PTSD, sponsored by the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS).
Dr. Farzin has recently started the first legal treatments of physician-supervised home-based psilocybin-assisted therapy in Montreal, Canada. He is a lecturer at McGill University medical school, where he earned his medical degree and trained as a family physician. Dr. Farzin is a co-founder of injoy, a digital health tool that helps people understand how their diet, lifestyle, digestive symptoms, and microbiome are all connected. He holds an M.Sc. in Nutrition from Columbia University and a B.A. in Molecular Cell Biology from UC Berkeley.
Manesh Girn
Manesh Girn is Chief Research Officer at the psychedelic bioscience company EntheoTech Bioscience, at which he has led the design of clinical trials and studies involving psilocybin and ketamine, as well as the development of a novel natural psilocybin formulation. He is currently in the latter stages of obtaining his PhD in Neuroscience at McGill University and has been lead or co-author on over a dozen scientific publications and book chapters. As part of his current academic work, he conducts research on the brain mechanisms underlying psychedelic drugs in collaboration with Dr. Robin Carhart-Harris, and will be joining Dr. Carhart-Harris at UCSF in Summer 2023. Finally, Manesh also has a YouTube channel - called The Psychedelic Scientist - where he discusses the latest findings in psychedelic science in an easy to understand, but non-superficial, form.
Joseph De Leo, PhD
Dr. Joseph A. De Leo, Ph.D., C.Psych., is a dual-licensed Clinical and Rehabilitation Psychologist in Ontario, Canada and New York State, USA. As the Founder and Clinical Director of the Centre for Compassionate Care (C3), Joseph and his team are deeply committed to establishing best practices and standards of care in the provisioning of psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy. As a clinician, Joseph specializes in the assessment and treatment of complex mental health conditions, including addictions, trauma, and chronic pain. He has extensive experience working in a variety of clinical settings, including hospital-based programs and community-based practices, and is involved in clinical teaching, training, and supervision initiatives within healthcare organizations and universities alike.
Joseph has completed specialized training in psychedelic-assisted therapies and research, most notably at the California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS), MAPS-based MDMA-Assisted Psychotherapy for PTSD, as well as through ongoing mentorship and consultation in ketamine-assisted psychotherapy with local practitioners and culturally diverse peer groups. Along with Dr. Mitch Earleywine, he is the co-developer of Integrative Ketamine Enhanced Psychotherapy (IKEP) for difficult-to-treat mental health conditions, including depressive, trauma- and stressor-related disorders (i.e., PTSD).
Joseph has specific interests in advocacy that focuses on the safe and compassionate use of psychoactive plants and psychedelic medicines, including therapeutic cannabis and psilocybin. As an author and consumer of clinical and psychological research, Joseph and his team actively engage in scholarship, policy discussions, and clinical research practices that promote client-centered, person-focused, trauma and culturally informed evidence-based care models that can broaden access to effective mental health treatments.
Brendan Leier, PhD
Brendan Leier, PhD is a philosopher and clinical ethicist. He is a member of the Dossetor Health Ethics Centre in the Faculty of Medicine and Dentistry at the University of Alberta. He has been a teacher and bedside clinician for twenty years. His academic interests include end-of-life, moral distress, research ethics, MAID, and psychedelic assisted therapy.
Leah Mayo, PhD
Leah Mayo, PhD is the Parker Psychedelics Research Chair and an Assistant Professor at the Mathison Centre for Mental Health Research, the Hotchkiss Brain Institute, and the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Calgary. She received a PhD in Neurobiology from the University of Chicago in 2015 and then relocated to Sweden to join the Center for Social and Affective Neuroscience as a postdoc and then independent investigator. Her research focuses on the development of novel pharmacotherapeutic interventions for stress-related disorders, including post-traumatic stress disorder and substance use disorders, with a particular focus on cannabinoid- and psychedelic-based compounds. Her recent work has resulted in early career recognitions from the European Behavioral Pharmacology Society, the Society of Biological Psychiatry, the Society for Social Neuroscience, and the Brain and Behavior Research Foundation.
