Message from the Chair

Welcome to the Department of Psychiatry and Human Behavior at the UCI School of Medicine. We are a world-class academic psychiatry department that provides exceptional education for UCI medical students, adult psychiatry residents and child and adolescent psychiatry fellows; conducts high-impact translational and clinical research directed toward understanding the causes of mental illness and addiction and advancing the development of new approaches to treatment and prevention; and delivers outstanding clinical care.

Our clinical programming supports a continuum of care in our community, including inpatient, outpatient and intensive outpatient care, delivered on the UCI Medical Center Campus in Orange, California. Additional outpatient programming is provided in Newport Beach, and our faculty and trainees also provide care in a range of additional settings through our partners at the VA Medical Center in Long Beach and Orange County Healthcare Agency Behavioral Health Services. Our faculty also supports community care provided at the UCI Family Health Center, a Federally Qualified Health Center. New specialty programs in early psychosis care and mood disorders are under development.

Embedded in a top 10 public research university, the research programs in the department span a broad range of disciplines, including stem cell biology, aging and neurodegeneration, sleep, neurodevelopment, psychotic disorders, computational psychiatry and precision health. We are also collaborating closely in the development of the Noel Drury, MD Institute for Translational Depression Discoveries, a new interdisciplinary center focused on transforming our understanding and treatment of depression.

We are living in a time of crisis for human mental health and well-being, but also a time of newfound public acceptance of the value of mental health care and the urgent need to ensure access for those who need it. The past three decades have yielded rapid progress in psychiatric therapeutics, with new tools for neuromodulation, rapid-acting therapies and the emerging use of imaging and other biomarkers to enable a precision health approach to mental health. The Department of Psychiatry at UCI School of Medicine is embracing these challenges and opportunities, and we encourage you to join us to lead the field with evidence-based therapeutics and research that advances patient care.

Cameron Carter, MD
Professor and Chair, Department of Psychiatry & Human Behavior