Stanislav Grof, M.D. is a psychiatrist, author, and founder of the International Transpersonal Association (ITA). A US citizen born in Prague, Czechoslovakia (on 1 July 1931), he practiced in Prague as Director of the Psychiatric Institute until 1960. Following the Russian invasion in 1968, he emigrated to the USA where he became Assistant Professor of Psychiatry at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, Chief of Psychiatric Research at the Maryland Psychiatric Research Center, Scholar-in-Residence at Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California, and a member of the Global Vision Adviser Group.

        He is one of the founders and chief theoreticians of transpersonal psychology. His field is: the therapeutic and heuristic aspects of non-ordinary states of consciousness; the use of psychedelics and non-drug techniques in experiential psychotherapy; alternative approaches to psychoses; spiritual emergency and treatment of transpersonal crises; the implications for psychiatric theory and the emerging scientific paradigm of recent developments in quantum physics, information and systems theory, biology, brain research, and consciousness studies.

        Stanislav Grof and his wife Christina have developed a non-drug technique called Holotropic Breathwork. This technique has been used successfully in the treatment of schizophrenia, alcoholism, neurosis, drug addiction, asthma and other illnesses.