Biography

Joseph Friedman is a current MS3 at the David Geffen School of Medicine. He has completed a PhD in the Social Medicine track of the Medical Informatics PhD at UCLA, a master’s degree in public health from the University of Washington, focused on Global Health Metrics, and an intensive three-year data science fellowship at the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation. His current research focuses on mixed methods approaches, blending ethnography and data science, to measure rapidly evolving health inequalities and trace their upstream structural drivers. He has applied these techniques especially to the study of the North American overdose crisis, and to documenting rapidly emerging trends and inequalities in socially-bound causes of mortality in the United States. His first-author peer-reviewed articles have been published in journals including JAMA, Nature, The Lancet, JAMA Psychiatry, and the American Journal of Psychiatry, and his popular press writings have appeared in venues such as The Los Angeles Times, Time Magazine, and The Nation. He is fluent in written and spoken Spanish—including for academic and medical contexts—and has spent a collective total of five years living and working in Mexico and elsewhere in Latin America.