Dr. Charles Tart pioneered the field of consciousness studies decades ago, with his classic best-selling anthology Altered States of Consciousness, in print for more than 20 years and selected by Common Boundary as one of the one hundred most influential psychology books of the twentieth century. Tart is credited with almost single-handedly legitimizing the study of altered states,including hypnosis, meditation, lucid dreaming and drug-induced states. He initiated several important lines of research in parapsychology, including teaching ESP and out-of-body experiences.
He is currently a Core Faculty Member at the Institute of Transpersonal Psychology (Palo Alto, California) and a Senior Research Fellow of the Institute of Noetic Sciences (Sausalito, California), as well as Professor Emeritus of Psychology at the Davis campus of the University of California,where he served for 28 years. He was the first holder of the Bigelow Chair of Consciousness Studies at the University of Nevada in Las Vegas and has served as a Visiting Professor in East-West Psychology at the CaliforniaI nstitute of Integral Studies, as an Instructor in Psychiatry at the Schoo lof Medicine of the University of Virginia, and a consultant on government funded parapsychological research at the Stanford Research Institute (now known as SRI International).