Welcome to the UCLA Psychiatry Residency Training Program! We are a large program located in metropolitan Los Angeles with major training sites at the Stewart and Lynda Resnick Neuropsychiatric Hospital at UCLA, the VA West Los Angeles Healthcare Center, the Los Angeles County Department of Mental Health, and numerous community-based organizations. Our psychiatric hospital and the UCLA Health System as a whole are both widely respected for clinical and research excellence and have been recognized by the U.S. News & World Report as among the highest ranked health systems on the West Coast as well as for psychiatry in particular.

In addition to working with a variety of patient populations at these sites, we offer a wide exposure to different treatment settings (inpatient hospital, outpatient clinic, day program, consultation-liaison, integrated mental health, and long-term psychotherapy), instruction in many different aspects of psychiatric treatment (psychodynamic therapies, cognitive behavioral therapies, group therapy, brief interventions, psychopharmacology, and neuromodulation including ECT and TMS), and an approach to the understanding of mental illness that incorporates neuroscience, evidence-based medicine, social determinants of health, structural competency, health equity, and psychodynamic approaches.

Applicants sometimes ask what we’re looking for in a resident, but there is no one answer to this question. We value diversity both in the training that we offer and the residents that we recruit. We are proud to have a group of trainees with a wide variety of backgrounds, impressive accomplishments, and career interests who are dedicated to learning and providing compassionate clinical care. We feel that the real strength of our program is rooted in the residents themselves. Accordingly, we have adopted a resident-centered approach in which trainees play an active role in identifying areas of needed change and in working collaboratively with a responsive administration towards quality improvement and maximizing clinical and educational goals.

Los Angeles, UCLA, and our residency training program are large and diverse settings where the weather is almost always perfect. We hope that this website will help you to get a sense of what we have to offer. We look forward to meeting you!

Jonathan Heldt, MD

Program Director

Alaina Burns, MD

Associate Program Director

Sarah Nguyen, MD

Associate Program Director