William E. Fantegrossi, also known as Bill Fantegrossi and the head of the Fantegrossi Laboratory, is a behavioral pharmacologist and psychoactive drug researcher at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences (UAMS) in Little Rock, Arkansas. He and his team have studied psychoactive drugs including psychedelics, entactogens, stimulants, and cannabinoids, among others. Fantegrossi and his colleagues primarily conduct animal studies of psychedelic and other psychoactive drugs.
Fantegrossi has noted that existing antidepressants are only slightly more effective than placebos and come with prominent side effects such as sexual dysfunction. He has stated the need for better psychiatric drugs and has expressed interest in chemically tweaking psychoactive drugs like psychedelics to provide therapeutic benefits such as anxiolytic effects. Fantegrossi has worked in affiliation with PharmAla in the early 2020s studying entactogens like MDMA and novel analogues for potential medical use, such as treatment of autistic spectrum disorders.
Along with David E. Nichols and others, Fantegrossi was featured as one of the major academic psychedelic drug researchers at the time in Dirty Pictures, a 2010 documentary about the psychedelic chemist Alexander Shulgin. According to Fantegrossi, he himself does not take psychedelic drugs and has never had a psychedelic experience. Fantegrossi holds materialist beliefs. He plays the guitar and he and his son have competed together in strongman competitions.