Ricky N. Bluthenthal, Ph.D. is the Associate Dean for Social Justice, Vice Chair for Equity, Diversity and Inclusion and a Distinguished Professor of Population and Public Health Sciences (formerly Preventive Medicine) in the Keck School of Medicine at the University of Southern California. His major research contributions have been in the areas of HIV epidemiology and prevention for drug injectors and men who have sex with men, racial/ethnic differences in alcohol consumption, consequences, and treatment outcomes, and community approaches to health promotion. His current research (December 2023) examines whether cannabis legalization leads to changes in opioid use patterns among people who inject drugs, tests the efficacy of a single session intervention to reduce injection initiation, and uses qualitative research methods to explore opioid use patterns among sexual minority men. Dr. Bluthenthal has published over 190 studies in peer-reviewed scientific journals such as the American Journal of Public Health, Addiction, Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research, Social Science and Medicine, and Health Services Research. He is on the editorial boards of Drug and Alcohol Dependence, the International Journal on Drug Policy, and PLOS ONE. He received his doctoral degree in Sociology from the University of California, Berkeley in 1998.