UCSD Profiles

search, discover, network

Joseph Friedman, MD, PhD, MPH is a resident physician in the research track, and substance use researcher, in the department of psychiatry at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD). He completed an MD and PhD in Social Medicine at UCLA, a master’s degree in public health from the University of Washington, focused on Global Health Metrics, and an intensive three-year global health data science fellowship at the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation. His research combines epidemiological and anthropological approaches to studying substance use, drug overdose, psychiatric conditions, and other socially-bound causes of mortality and morbidity. He has a particular interest in the US-Mexico border region and have spent several years living and working in Tijuana, Mexico. He is fluent in written and spoken Spanish—including for academic and medical contexts. His first-author peer-reviewed articles have been published in journals including JAMA, Nature, The Lancet, JAMA Psychiatry, the American Journal of Psychiatry, and Addiction and his popular press writings have appeared in venues such as The Los Angeles Times, Time Magazine, and The Nation.