Biography
Dr. Carrico works across a diverse research portfolio that covers the areas of Health Promotion and Disease Prevention, Global Health, Brain, Behavior and the Environment, and Epidemiology. While at UM, Dr. Carrico initiated a translational research program focused on psychoneuroimmunology among people with HIV. His team was the first to demonstrate that recent stimulant use among sexual minority men with treated HIV infection was associated with alterations in key pathophysiologic processes relevant to HIV pathogenesis such as immune activation and inflammation. Currently, Dr. Carrico is co-leading a randomized controlled trial funded by the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) examining the effects of cognitive-behavioral treatment for adherence and depression on the microbiome-gut-brain axis in people with HIV who have evidence of elevated inflammation.
In 2006, Dr. Carrico completed his doctorate in clinical-health psychology at the University of Miami where he specialized in the interdisciplinary field of psychoneuroimmunology, which examines the bi-directional connections between the central nervous system and immune system. After completing a clinical internship in Behavioral Medicine at the Veterans Affairs Palo Alto Health System, Dr. Carrico joined the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) as a postdoctoral fellow in Health Psychology and then Reproductive Infectious Disease.
In over a decade as a postdoctoral fellow and junior faculty at UCSF, Dr. Carrico pursued community-engaged, clinical, and biobehavioral studies targeting the intertwining epidemics of methamphetamine and HIV in sexual minority men (i.e., gay, bisexual, and other men who have sex with men). He led one of the first studies documenting the outcomes of substance use disorder treatment implemented from a harm reduction perspective, which was featured in the San Francisco Chronicle. In other clinical research studies, Dr. Carrico has focused on addressing methamphetamine and other amphetamine-type stimulant use in low- and middle-income countries. Currently, Dr. Carrico is leading four randomized controlled trials funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) to optimize the benefits of biomedical approaches to HIV prevention such as pre-exposure prophylaxis and HIV treatment as prevention in sexual minority men who use stimulants.
Dr. Carrico is also a multiple principal investigator for two large national cohorts of sexual minority men who use stimulants, funded by the NIH. The American Transformative HIV Study (AMETHST) is examining the biological and behavioral pathways whereby the use of methamphetamine is linked to a substantially amplified risk of HIV among sexual minority men. Dr. Carrico is leading efforts of the team to conduct a case-cohort study to examine if methamphetamine use alters rectal chemokines and cytokines that, in turn, confer amplified biological risk for HIV seroconversion in the cohort. The American Remote Contact HIV Epidemiology Study (ARCHES) will enroll 1,000 sexual minority men with HIV to examine multi-level modifiers of the associations of stimulant use with viral suppression and inflammation.