Dr. Misty Richards is a child, adult, and reproductive psychiatrist and Associate Professor at UCLA who holds a joint appointment in the Division of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry and the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology. She serves as the Program Director for the UCLA Child and Adolescent Psychiatry Fellowship and is highly involved in medical student education as the Co-Chair of the UCLA DGSOM Medical Education Committee. Clinically, Dr. Richards serves as the Director of Infant Mental Health of the UCLA Maternal Mental Health Intensive Outpatient Program and 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. In addition, she is Co-Founder and Director of the Perinatal-Infant Mental Health (PIM) Network, a multidisciplinary community of clinicians, researchers, educators, and families working to integrate perinatal and infant mental health care. She is a passionate clinician-educator with expertise in treating perinatal mood disorders, psychosis, and parent-infant attachment disorders, while also educating the next generation about reproductive psychiatry and early childhood mental health. She has published more than 100 papers.

Dr. Richards’ interest in perinatal mental health began at UCLA, where she earned a B.S. in Psychobiology while researching anxiety and depression in pregnant mothers. She went on to study the neurogenetics of mood disorders as a research fellow at the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, and Columbia University. During this time, she also helped found a medical clinic in Ddegeya Village, Uganda, and built a partnership between the village and several U.S. universities and organizations. She earned her M.D. and an M.S. in Neuroscience at Albany Medical College, where she also served as National Student President of the American Medical Women’s Association. Midway through medical school, she was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship to continue her neuroscience training in Japan. There, she studied attitudes toward schizophrenia and how BDNF, a protein that helps brain cells grow and survive, responds to stress hormones, estrogen, and antidepressants. She returned to UCLA for her General Psychiatry Residency, where she served as Editor-in-Chief of the American Journal of Psychiatry Residents’ Journal. She then fast-tracked into the UCLA Child and Adolescent Psychiatry Fellowship and served as Chief Fellow.

Dr. Richards serves on the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry’s Women’s and Training & Education Committees. She is past President of the Southern California Society of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, a former Early Career Advisory Board Member of Psychiatric Services, and a former member of the American Psychiatric Association’s Council on Children, Adolescents, and their Families.