Resident Physician
UCSD
Dr. Joseph Friedman is a resident physician in the research track of the psychiatry residency program at the University of California San Diego. Clinically his interests lie in the treatment of opioid, methamphetamine and polysubstance use disorders, as well as psychosis. As a researcher, his recent work has focused largely on characterizing shifts in the epidemiology and social characteristics of the US overdose crisis, including a changing profile of synthetic substances involved, demographic shifts, and racial and ethnic inequalities. He has published over 70 peer reviewed manuscripts on these topics, including first-author publications in NEJM, JAMA, Nature, The Lancet, JAMA Psychiatry, the American Journal of Psychiatry, and Addiction. His doctoral research focused on advancing mixed-methods approaches that integrate ethnography and data science towards rapid, nuanced, and inequalities-oriented public health surveillance. He has undertaken numerous mixed methods in diverse contexts in the US (Southern California, California’s Central Valley, Philadelphia) and Latin America (especially Tijuana, Mexico). During his PhD fieldwork he conducted several years of participant observation fieldwork with people who inject drugs in Tijuana—most of whom had been deported from the U.S.—studying evolving substance use patterns, associated health risks, and barriers to accessing healthcare and other services. He is fluent in written and spoken Spanish, including for academic and medical contexts, and has spent a cumulative total of five years living and working in Tijuana.
