Misty C. Richards MD, MS

Misty Richards is the Associate Program Director for the UCLA Semel Institute’s Child and Adolescent Psychiatry Fellowship and holds a joint appointment as Assistant Clinical Professor in both the UCLA Division of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry and the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology. She graduated with a Bachelor of Science in Psychobiology from UCLA, where her interest in perinatal mental health first began, while conducting research studying pregnant mothers with anxiety and depression. For the next four years, Dr. Richards was a research fellow at the National Institutes of Health and National Science Foundation, studying among other things the pathophysiology of mood disorders. During this time, she also helped start a medical clinic in Ddegeya Village, Uganda, where she began a partnership between this rural area of Uganda and multiple U.S. universities and organizations. At Albany Medical College in New York.

Dr. Richards obtained an M.S. in Neuroscience along with her medical degree and was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship to study the stigma of mental illness in Japan compared to the United States . Dr. Richards then completed her General Psychiatry Residency and Child Fellowship at the UCLA Semel Institute. Since joining faculty at UCLA, Dr. Richards has developed her expertise in the area of perinatal psychiatry and infant mental health, currently serving as the Associate Medical Director of the newly established Perinatal Partial Hospitalization Program. She has been a leader in medical student education in addition to developing curriculum for our child psychiatry fellowship!