Dr. Kali Carrigan
Kali Carrigan, PhD, is a Scientific Writer at the Life Extension Advocacy Foundation / Lifespan.io and a sociologist of death and dying whose research addresses palliative care development, futures of death, existential suffering, and biography. She is a public advocate for research on aging and longevity, with particular expertise in assisted dying, end-of-life choice, and psychedelic-assisted therapy.
Kali has written for Lifespan.io since 2017, translating longevity science for a general audience. The organization (which merged with the SENS Research Foundation in 2024 to form the Lifespan Research Institute) funds and promotes research into the root causes of aging. Her articles there challenge the assumption that rejuvenation lies beyond reach.
Read The “Not in my Lifetime” argument, Waking up From the Dream of Longevity, and What is Creatine? A Summary of Methylguanidine Acetic Acid. She also reviewed the investment guide by our Jim Mellon and our Al Chalabi. Read Juvenescence: Investing in the Age of Longevity.
Her study of how newspapers in four Western European countries framed travel to Switzerland for assisted dying between 2002 and 2021 appeared in Mortality in 2024. It identifies four recurring themes, including Dignitas as an “emergency exit” and dying in Switzerland as a “good death.” Read One-way ticket to Zürich: presentations of ‘Suicide tourism’ in European news media. She presented an earlier version of this work, Choosing Death: Suicide Tourism in the European Media, at the 14th International Conference on the Social Context of Death, Dying and Disposal (DDD14) at the University of Bath in 2019.
Kali also writes on the therapeutic and possible geroprotective effects of psychedelics. In 2022, she coauthored a review in Revue Education Santé Sociétés with Maxime François, Zoë Dubus, and Baptiste Fauvel on psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy as a response to end-of-life anxiety and depression. Read L’anxiété et la dépression liées à la fin de vie soulagées par psychothérapie assistée de psychédéliques.
For Psychedelic Science Review, she has surveyed six decades of research on psilocybin and LSD for death anxiety in terminal patients, as well as emerging evidence linking psychedelics to reduced inflammation, telomere biology, and neuroplasticity. Read Can Psilocybin and LSD Relieve Existential Suffering? and Psychedelics: A New Fountain of Youth? Read her Contributions in Psychedelic Science Review.
Between 2017 and 2018, Kali was a Scientific Research Specialist at the Forever Healthy Foundation, the German initiative founded by our Michael Greve to help people greatly extend their healthy lifespan. She contributed the chapter Taking Up the Cosmic Office: Transhumanism and the Necessity of Longevity to The Transhumanism Handbook, edited by our Newton Lee.
Since 2012, she has volunteered with the SENS Research Foundation as a Spanish translator of Ending Aging (2007) by our Aubrey de Grey and Michael Rae, and she was one of the first to translate the book into Spanish. Between 2010 and 2011, she volunteered in the MitoSENS Research lab of the SENS Research Foundation. Read A Q&A with Aubrey de Grey and The Necessity of Longevity.
Kali began her career in the life sciences. She earned her BSc with Honours in Molecular Genetics in 2006 from Trinity College Dublin, where she served as Secretary of the Dublin University Computer Science Society. Between 2006 and 2007, she was a Cancer Researcher at the Institute of Molecular Medicine at St James’s Hospital in Dublin, characterizing the effects of inhibiting thromboxane synthase and prostacyclin synthase on oesophageal adenocarcinoma cell lines. She also holds an Animal Research Certificate from University College Dublin.
Turning to psychology and end-of-life care, she earned her B.A. in Psychology and Latin in 2015 from Concordia University in Montreal, where she was lead organizer of the Concordia Spoken Latin group. From 2014 to 2015, she was a Palliative Care Counsellor at St. Mary’s Hospital in Montreal, holding a Palliative Care Counsellor certification from McGill University. She earned her M.A. in Cognitive Semiotics in 2017 from Aarhus University in Denmark, where she led the Charles S. Peirce reading group and served as student representative on the Linguistics, Cognitive Science, and Cognitive Semiotics Study Board.
In March 2026, Kali earned her PhD from the University of Amsterdam, where she was a doctoral candidate at the Amsterdam Institute for Social Science Research (AISSR) in the Political Sociology: Power, Place and Difference programme group from 2018 to 2026. Supervised by Patrick Brown and Stuart Blume, her dissertation The Last Stop: A Biographical Approach to a Chosen Death in Switzerland draws on seven years of in-depth interviews with people preparing to travel to Switzerland for an assisted death.
It challenges the view that this decision is a purely rational, isolated choice and introduces the concepts of “biographical contraction” and “biographical closure” to explain how a hastened death can protect identity and narrative coherence in the face of physical, social, and existential loss. The project received full-time funding from the Fonds de recherche du Québec – Société et culture between 2018 and 2022. Read How life stories shape the path to assisted death.
Read her thesis chapter The Social Function of Images of Death in Late Medieval Art. Between 2016 and 2017, she was a Research Interviewer at Lindberg International, a Danish market research and consulting firm.
Kali is based in France and speaks English and French.
Visit her LinkedIn profile, University of Amsterdam profile, Academia.edu page, and Lifespan.io profile. Follow her on Facebook, X and YouTube.