There have been a lot of turns along my career.

I started in an undergraduate training in math and physics, and I thought I was going to be a mathematician. And then I realized that I didn't want to spend my life solving problems behind a desk, and I wanted to work a little bit more with people.

And somewhat by chance I met a faculty member in a program in psychology and was accepted into a graduate program in psychology without having any coursework in psychology, quite honestly. And I loved it from the first day. It was very exciting to be learning about how people function and about human behavior.

Then another turn came when I was, towards the end of my graduate program I was approached by a former graduate of my program, who now was working at the University of Miami, who asked me to take on a research position. And she knew that I had a science background, and quite honestly at the time I wanted to be a clinician.

And I turned the job down twice. I said "Absolutely not, I want to be a clinician," and the third time she called me, I said, "Well you know I need a job, and so I'm going to take it."

And from the first day I started that job, I loved it because the research I had seen in my graduate program, and of course we're going back a lot of years, was boring. It was silly stuff. And the research in working with recent Hispanic immigrants were about people with real problems, and it was very exciting.

So to my surprise I got hooked into research by coming into the right position. And this one person, Mercedes Scopetta, was the only mentor, the only real professional mentor I ever had, and I was with her, or she was because she retired then, for about four years.

And she got me into drug abuse and families, which has been the largest part of my work, has been in family-based interventions and drug abuse with Hispanic populations. And I became a researcher, got NIH grants

And in time my career changed again because I was working in adolescent drug treatment research, and I felt like working with one family at a time was never going to tackle the scope of the problem. And so I began to move into prevention, with the same population -- Hispanic families, preventing adolescent drug use -- and I continued the adolescent drug treatment research, at the same time developed a program of researching prevention.

And in time, again, I felt that that wasn't going to reach the scope of the problem, and so about ten years ago I began to work at a public health level in doing research with much larger systems. And much to my surprise, today I'm a Chairman of the Department of Public Health Sciences, Epidemiology and Public Health.

So my career has taken a lot of turns over the years.