Dr. Friedman is a post-doctoral research fellow in the Jane and Terry Semel Institute of Neuroscience and Human Behavior's Health Services Research Center in the Department of Psychiatry at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA. Dr. Friedman is a cultural anthropologist with research interests in the areas of political economy, the experience of mental illness, the cultures of medicine, and mental health care. Since 1995, Dr. Friedman has conducted 48 months of fieldwork in Romania, examining anxiety among downwardly mobile communities in the Jiu Valley coal mining regions as well as conducting extensive ethnographic research on adjustment disorders, depression, and schizophrenia in mental health care in five psychiatric facilities throughout Romania. Dr. Friedman received his Ph.D. in cultural anthropology from Duke University as well as receiving training in culture and mental health through an NIMH-funded post-doctoral fellowship at the University of Chicago.

Dr. Friedman is currently receiving funding from the NIMH-funded R01 research project "California Mental Health Services Act: Impact on Practice." Dr. Friedman is responsible for conducting clinical and outcome surveys as well as full-time, immersive ethnographic fieldwork in community mental health care settings examining the impact of California's Mental Health Services Act on policy changes, clinic culture, and patient outcomes. He has assumed major responsibilities as an on-site clinical ethnographer at the Long Beach Mental Health Clinic as well as contributing to survey design and qualitative research methodology design for the broader study.