Nick grew up on California’s central coast in San Luis Obispo. It was a service learning course at Cal Poly that first introduced him to harm reduction work and sparked an interest in community health that would shape everything that followed. He took that interest further at Cal Poly, where he studied Biology with a concentration in Anatomy & Physiology, and began volunteering at a local syringe exchange, work that led him to develop a naloxone distribution program for soon-to-be-released inmates at the San Luis Obispo County Jail. Following this, he moved to Los Angeles, providing harm reduction services at Venice Family Clinic’s Syringe Services Program and becoming a certified HIV & Hepatitis C test counselor, before taking on a Program Manager role on the COVID-19 Response Team for Housing for Health, a division of the Los Angeles County Department of Health Services. He then traveled across the country to Duke University, where the physician assistant profession was born in 1965, and completed his Master of Health Science in 2024. He returned to Los Angeles to join APLA Health, where he now provides primary care, serving the community he has long called home.
