Eraka Bath, MD
Eraka Bath, MD, is the director of the Community Partnerships Core for the Child Mind Institute’s Youth Mental Health Academy. In this role, she leads a team of experts focused on developing alliances and relationships with schools and community-based organizations as a means of recruiting students to the program. She is board certified in child and adolescent, adult, and forensic psychiatry. Dr. Bath is an associate professor and Vice Chair for Justice, Equity, Diversity and Inclusion in the Department of Psychiatry at the UCLA David Geffen School of Medicine. She is also a senior advisor for the school’s Antiracism Roadmap (ARR).
Dr. Bath has a long-standing interest in community mental health and has committed her career to advancing health equity for ethnoracially minoritized and structurally marginalized youth and families, with specialized focus on youth impacted by the foster care and juvenile legal systems. Her portfolio of research has included funding from the National Institutes of Health, PCORI, and Los Angeles County Department of Probation. She teaches on structural racism and antiracism, and its impacts on mental health and biomedical research and workforce. As a senior strategist to the ARR at the UCLA David Geffen School of Medicine, Dr. Bath leads or co-leads a variety of including Restorative Justice, the Racial Justice Report Card, the Antiracist Transformation in Medical Education, JEDI Academic Mentoring Council, and the Black Latinx Native American Faculty Collective. Her current research involves using community participatory models to increase engagement in behavioral and reproductive health for girls with histories of commercial sexual exploitation and those involved in the child welfare and juvenile legal systems.
Dr. Bath has also served on the UCLA David Geffen School of Medicine’s Diversity Oversight Committee as well as the Psychiatry Diversity Interest Group. Over the last decade, she has been active in organized psychiatry and has served on several committees in the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law, the American Psychiatric Association, and the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry (AACAP). She is currently the co-chair of the Children and Law Committee for AACAP.
Dr. Bath maintains a private practice focused on forensic consultation to attorneys and governmental agencies, on a variety of cases involving mental health and the law. Her areas of specialization include juvenile competency to stand trial, commercially sexually exploited youth, fitness and waiver to adult court, personal injury, PTSD, child maltreatment, education rights, risk management, termination of parental rights, and child custody matters.
Education and Training
- Fellow, Child Psychiatry and Forensic Psychiatry, NYU School of Medicine, New York, NY
- Intern, Psychiatry, Saint Vincent’s Hospital, New York, NY
- MD, Howard University College of Medicine, Washington, DC
- BA, Interdisciplinary Studies in the Social Sciences, University of California, Berkeley, CA
