2019 Year In Review

This year I made a big move, giving up my primary appointment at UCLA to move to UC Irvine. As a UCLA undergraduate, I had always wanted to return to UCLA. I was so happy when I got a postdoc and then faculty position there in the School of Medicine, where I worked for more than 10 years. I’m so grateful for the friends I made and the mentorship I received over the years. That’s why, although I’ve never made a public post or announcement about my past year (I do keep a more personal private journal), I decided to do it this year to reflect on the big change in my life. Here are some of the past year’s events!

-Became Associate Professor in the UCI Departments of Emergency Medicine (School of Medicine) and Informatics (School of Information and Computer Science). In addition to research, I now get to teach/advise informatics and computer science students on emergency health and behavior change topics. I’ll be bringing students into the emergency department to study how to help solve ED problems. UCI has been extremely supportive, providing resources, staff, and involving me in high-level administrative planning to advance the campus.

-Appointed to a study committee for the National Academy of Medicine/Institute of Medicine. Our work is to advise the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on upcoming trends, prevention and treatment options to address sexually transmitted infections. My role is specifically focused on how technologies, data, new methods, and behavior change approaches can be incorporated.

-Grants: I am so fortunate to have been awarded multiple NIH grants this year from the National Institute on Drug Abuse/Helping End Addiction Long-Term (HEAL) Initiative to attempt to address the opioid crisis. These are focused on how technologies, data science, and hackathons can be used to help prevent and treat opioid dependence and overdose.

-Hey, it’s good to be back home again: Being close to my parents and my brother’s family, parks, beach, living in faculty housing, and being a 3 minute walk from the pool/hot-tub and office are some of the perks of returning to OC/living in Irvine. I can return to being myself both at work and outside, being able to nerd out talking about artificial intelligence models for public health and safety, while dressed in board shorts, flip flops and sunglasses.

-Book updates: Stick with It came out in Chinese, Korean, and we signed a deal for Russian. The Chinese version became a bestseller. Last month, the Fashion Island Barnes in Noble, where I used to hang out growing up, hosted me for a book reading and signing. Thank you, Renee!

Photo courtesy of Daren Schlecter.

-Hackathon: UCIPT hosted the 2nd Opioid Hackathon this Fall. The event was oversubscribed within a week with more than 150 participants. This year focused on Orange County’s needs, and included judges from the health department, clinics, and superior court judges. We have ongoing mentorship for winning teams to help them implement their solutions, like our retreat in Big Bear this week.

-UCI Beal Center for Innovation gave me the Fellowship Award for Entrepreneurship. This award is for faculty entrepreneurs who have conducted research with high impact to society. Promoting entrepreneurship among researchers/students has been a passion going back to graduate school at Stanford, so I’m excited to see where this leads.

-Teaching: I taught Health Informatics this Fall, with 160 public health, informatics, and computer science students! Many of them participated in the hackathon. I felt like a proud parent of my students.

Plans for 2020: This year I’m looking to build a new Center at UCI designed to predict events (more about that later if I put it together). I also want to reconnect with old friends and colleagues I’m also looking to spend more time volunteering and giving back and forward to the places and people that have made me happy and feel so lucky.

Get in touch: Please send me an update on you, and if I can help improve your life or work in some way.

Happy New Year!

Sean

From Houston to Hanukkah: The Psychological Benefits of New Experiences

Last week, after finishing a presentation at the National HIV Prevention Conference, I took a cross-country flight from Atlanta to Los Angeles (via Houston). After boarding the plane, I found my seat next to a middle-aged woman. To be courteous, I introduced myself to her. In a distinct Southern drawl, she told me her name was Laura and that she was flying home to Houston to spend Christmas with her family.

I nodded and began to arrange my carry-on items. I started a mental review of what had transpired at the conference: who I’d met, whether my presentation was successful, and what I had to do when I arrived home.

"Do you live in Houston?” Laura asked.

“No,” I said, welcoming the break in silence to learn about her life. I explained that I was returning from a meeting and was anxious to get home after a busy schedule of traveling the past few weeks.

“I understand,” she said. “I’m looking forward to the holidays to relax with my family. I planned to use this flight to do some Christmas shopping. Have you finished your Christmas shopping?”

 “Well, I’m Jewish. We celebrate Hanukkah,” I said. “So luckily, I’m already done with most of my shopping.”

“Oh,” she said. She opened her laptop, paused, and said, “That’s great. I know someone who’s Jewish.”

I laughed. “On behalf of our people, I hope he or she didn’t disappoint you,” I joked.     

Despite our apparent differences, we wound up talking throughout the flight—about her transition from an accountant to an event planner, my work as a behavioral scientist, and about life in Los Angeles vs. Houston. I realized that by the end of the two-hour flight we knew a lot about each other’s lives and beliefs. “You have to see the rodeo in the spring,” she said as we touched down in Houston. Before heading out, she handed me a piece of paper with her email address and phone number. “Come visit during March. My husband and I would love to show you a real Texas rodeo,” she said, with a wink and genuine warmth.

On the second leg of my trip, I thought a lot about Laura. Before meeting her, I would have thought we’d have little to talk about, no common ground. Her views and daily life were way out of alignment with my own, yet getting to know her turned out to be one of the highlights of my short trip.

Research has shown that we prefer to associate with people who think like we do. This tendency, known as confirmation bias, is the behavior of seeking or interpreting ideas in a way that favors personal beliefs. Finding ways to understand confirmation bias is a major feature of the work of Jonathan Haidt, author of The Righteous Mind. Dr. Haidt focuses on the world of politics, but his underlying theme is that relationships shouldn’t simply be about trying to sway or inform people. Rather, every relationship offers the opportunity to learn a new perspective—something I always try to keep in mind.

Being open to a conversation with a stranger on a plane (or on your local street corner) won’t cure the world’s ills, but it’s a start at uniting people from different backgrounds and cultures, and it might lead to a new friendship—or even the opportunity to attend a rodeo.

Sean Young, PhD, Reports Back from CDC HIV Conference on New Year's Resolutions

1. As a psychologist and researcher, what are the hardest New Years Resolutions for you to stick to?  Do you find that professional goals are easier to achieve than personal goals?

I wouldn't say the difficulty is broken down by professional goals vs personal ones. The great thing about psychology is that it doesn't care about domain. It doesn't care whether people are making resolutions to change business goals, health goals, relationship goals, or any other goals. What matters is the context of those goals, within the person, their surrounding, and their experience. That's a bit vague so I'll be more concrete.

The hardest New Years Resolutions to stick to are ones that require the biggest change in lifestyle to keep. If something is really tough to change, it will be tough to keep. If it's easy to change, it will be easier to keep. Take dieting as a resolution. My undergrad professor, Traci Mann, has done a lot of research and shown that diets don't work. Aside from biological reasons in people's genetics, most diets fail because they're diets, or big immediate changes in people's behaviors. They have been eating unhealthy food for a long time and decide that because it's the New Year, they'll have the ability to instantly change the way they eat. Most New Years Resolutions fail for the same reason. People want to instantly change something that has been part of their lifestyle for weeks, months, or years.

So the bad news is, New Years Resolutions need to be kept in perspective with how people have been living. If a person walks 50 steps a day, making a resolution to walk 10,000 steps a day won't last. The good news is, that there are ways to keep resolutions. People just need to keep them in perspective and make resolutions that are manageable. There are a lot of other ways to help keep on track based on our research. Some of these I mentioned in last week's Q and A, like the science of social. 

2. After attending the CDC's recent HIV prevention conference in Atlanta, do you find yourself shifting your own priorities to align with the research community as a whole?

I've realized I've been a researcher my whole life. It started long before my research assistant days at UCLA or doctoral work at Stanford. It started as a child as I loved learning about things and how they work. One of the most important things that I keep learning is that I need to always keep an open mind. I need to always listen to other people's ideas and perspective, no matter how crazy people might think they are, because I learn from them and it helps to guide my research. That's a broad answer to your question. The straight answer is, definitely. I'm constantly rethinking studies, research, and my own assumptions based on what I learn from the research community as well as everyone else. I learned a lot about people's perceptions of PREP at the HIV prevention conference in Atlanta and have been thinking about how technologies can be incorporated into Prep education and behavior change.

3. What are the main takeaways that you got from the CDC conference?  Where will HIV prevention be at this point in 2016?

The main takeaways is that although there is still a lot of work to do to reduce the spread of HIV, we've been getting some answers. Really importantly, we've been having support for controversial approaches from top officials, like the NIH director support use of Prep. For me, as a technology researcher wanting to find ways to predict, prevent, and change HIV risk, the main takeaways is that there is so much opportunity for tools to be used in this space. Researchers are very open to these tools but don't have the time to be aware of them. Because innovation and tech tools seem to always be at the forefront of how HIV is spread, we need to use that innovation to prevent and stop the spread of HIV. I'm excited that our team has the ability to do that and we're getting a great response from people all over the world who want to work with us and apply our research.

4. What steps can clinicians, families and societies take to remove the stigma from both HIV prevention pills and HIV testing?

Stigma is the belief that a person or thing is unwanted, disgraced, or or shameful. It can lead to a lot of negative consequences. When people are stigmatized they feel badly about themselves, they can lose their friends and family, their jobs, and can have worse health. When things are stigmatized, like getting an HIV test, it makes people to not want to do them. We've done a lot of studies on how stigma works and how it stops people from taking care of their health. (One of those studies you might like involved telling students they were at risk for a disease, and learning they they more or less convinced themselves they couldn't have contracted a disease if it was stigmatized).

Stigma is caused by lack of knowledge, lack of discussion, and lack of normalcy. The way to reduce or get rid of stigma is to educate people, make them aware of how stigma works, and make them see the stigmatized person or thing is common. For example, HIV testing is stigmatized. Just showing up to an HIV testing site could make people stigmatized. They could be judged by others in the clinic, by their doctors, by people seeing them getting tested. They could be judged as being "the type of people" who have HIV. To reduce this stigma, we can do things like talking about testing more, getting people to test more, and making testing more public so that people can see how many people test for HIV and that people from all ages, races/ethnic groups, and educational statuses test for HIV. That's great that so many people test, and it needs to be made more public. We found that stigma could be reduced by making the stigmatized thing (for example, testing) required. We also found that offering it in traditional settings like in vending machines may reduce stigma and get more people to test for HIV. 

5. What steps can Grindr, Tinder, Match.com and other online dating websites take to help prevent HIV?

These are dating/hook-up businesses and so they're less interested in preventing HIV than in their business, so I wouldn't expect them to make any major changes to help prevent HIV. Some of them are concerned about losing users if they try to promote HIV testing as they don't want to be branded as a public health site or place that is trying to get people to do anything other than find dating or hook-up partners. That being said, there are a few things they can do that could help prevent the spread of HIV and shouldn't negatively impact their business. First, they can be open to HIV researchers. Second, they can offer a feature that allows people to say if they have gotten an HIV test. Third, these sites and researchers can begin sharing data with each other to mutually find how to make their users safer and healthier.

The Daily Practice of New Year's Resolutions

With New Year's coming tomorrow, people are busy making their resolutions. It's time to plan how to become better people in the coming year. Exercise more, quit smoking, improve your diet. People make resolution resolutions too like finding a boy or girlfriend, improving their relationship, or dating more often too. There are also business resolutions like being more successful and making new connections.

I'm Jewish. Like many other cultures, Jews have their own new year, Rosh Hashanah. That means I get 2 New Years, or 2 chances to make resolutions of how I'm going to become a better person. That brings up the question, why do we have such a limited number of days to make resolutions to be better people? Why can't we make this a more frequent ritual?

We can.

The New Year is a time for optimism and rebirth, but it doesn't only have to be on January 1. We can make this a part of our lives every month, week, or day. Just like there are ritual practices like meditation and yoga, the process of bettering ourselves like we do on new years can be come a practice. Instead of waiting for next year to make resolutions on how to improve ourselves, let's make this a frequent ritual.