"So I'm Adam Carrico.
I'm an assistant professor in the Department of Community Health Systems in the School
of Nursing at UCSF.
I'm a psychologist by training and my work looks at kind of bio behavioral processes.
So how stress and substance use get inside the body and how we can design interventions
to help people reduce their substance use and optimize their health outcomes.
Particularly when they're living with HIV.
I was always interested in science.
I had like a chemistry set as a kid that was more like imaginative than anything.
But I was really fascinated with the idea that you can discover things and be the first
person to really start to understand a new process.
And my mom is a nurse so she has some good science background.
So I've really always been interested in it.
I was always really fascinated with how stress affects the body and how it affects people's
behaviors like their adherence to their medications or their substance use.
But also their health outcomes like how stress can change the immune system or have negative
affects on the immune system.
And as an undergrad I did a lot of work in HIV prevention.
And the HIV medications, the new ones, were just coming on at that time.
So really we saw a lot of people living longer and managing HIV not as a terminal disease
but as a chronic disease.
So I was really interested in how people now manage their medication regimens and deal
with the other behavioral factors that could impact their life expectancy like their exercise,
their substance use, their sexual risk taking behavior.
So that's where it all started for me.
I think that's the difficulty of being a scientist.
I mean a lot of the work that we do happens off the nine to five clock right.
So I'm, during the day I'm teaching, I'm seeing study staff, meeting with students, going
to committee meetings and so the time to write papers really happens for me on like Saturday
mornings and Sunday mornings.
I'll wake up around six every morning and write for a couple of hours.
So analyzing data, writing pares, getting grants together, reviewing papers and then
I'll come in and kind of meet with my project director and other study staff just to check
in around things that are happening with participants, working with issues that we're encountering
with data or with different operational kind of challenges for the studies.
And maybe a little teaching or committee meeting somewhere in between there.
So right now we're working mainly with methamphetamine using gay and bisexual men.
And they're going through treatment here in the community just down the street at the
Tenderloin AIDS foundation.
And so we work with them and deliver an intervention that's designed to help them cope with the
stress of reducing their substance use.
And hopefully that has beneficial effects on their drug use and their health outcomes.
That's what a lot of my work is about, really helping people find that sense of resilience
or hope in their lives and that ability even in the midst of some of the most difficult
circumstances.
Like coping with addition, methamphetamine use disorder for example.
Or a chronic mental health problem like bipolar disorder, finding ways to show folks that
they're their own best asset and that they have the capacity to kind of move forward
with improving their lives.
So that's really the orientation that all of our interventions take in an attempt to
help people make it through drug treatment more effectively.
And it take a huge commitment on one hand to kind of get grants funded and to do studies
and get the data and get the results out there.
But at the same time it's really worth it in the end when you get improve, hopefully
the way that we substance use and how it relates to HIV AIDS or hopefully someday find new
treatments to help people recover more effectively or have better long term outcomes.
Really the work is super exciting to me.
So I feel really fortunate to have about 70% of what I do be something that I feel like
is fun and enjoyable and that I would do even if I didn't get paid for it.
I think that's a very rare kind of experience in life, that work feels
a lot like fun."