Misty Charissa Richards MD, MS

Misty Richards, MD, MS, is an Associate Clinical Professor with a joint appointment in the UCLA Division of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry and the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology. She is the Program Director for the UCLA Child and Adolescent Psychiatry Fellowship and also a Core Faculty Educator in the Scientific Foundations of Medicine for the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA. 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 the 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 stigma associated with mental illness in the inpatient population in Japan. She then completed her General Psychiatry Residency and Child Fellowship at the UCLA Semel Institute.

Since joining the 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 UCLA Maternal Mental Health Partial Hospitalization Program. Dr. Richards is also the Co-Founder and Medical Director of Perinatal Psychiatry for the Maternal Outpatient Mental Health Services (MOMS) Clinic in the Department of OB-GYN.