Project Summary/Abstract This K24 award will support the candidate’s development as a mentor and substance use investigator, while completing a novel study of the use of non-prescribed stimulants in the self-care of chronic pain, particularly among people living with HIV and neuropathic pain. The candidate will complete training in mentoring through differentness to further enhance his ability to mentor trainees underrepresented in science, while also developing and delivering a training targeted for mentors not underrepresented, in order to improve the pipeline of senior mentors who can effectively mentor underrepresented trainees. He will also enhance his abilities to conduct substance use research by obtaining additional training in implementation science, ecological momentary assessment, adaptive trial design, and pain research. He will undertake directed reading with experts in pain research and in mentoring. In addition, the candidate will pursue new research to examine the phenomenon of non-prescribed stimulant use self-care of chronic pain. The candidate will enroll 50 people living with HIV and neuropathic pain who report methamphetamine use for pain self-care for 6 months of ecological momentary assessments, to determine the relationship between use and functional pain. The candidate will conduct qualitative interviews with 30 of the participants to explore the nature of the pain and relationship between physical and social pain, as well as the perceived risks and benefits to methamphetamine use. Finally, he will compare those who do not use stimulants, who use stimulants for pain, and who use stimulants for other reasons from his longitudinal cohort study of patients with chronic pain to establish longitudinal effects of methamphetamine use for pain self-care.

Project Narrative This project will support the candidate’s development as a mentor in patient-oriented substance use research by providing protected time for advanced training in implementation science, ecological momentary assessment, adaptive trial design, pain research, mentoring faculty-level mentees, developing a training for mentors in mentoring through differentness, and supporting a novel study of non-prescribed stimulant use for neuropathic pain among people living with HIV.