Gail Wyatt, Ph.D.

Gail Elizabeth Wyatt, PhD is a Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Psychiatry and Bio Behavioral Sciences at the Semel Institute of Neuroscience and Behavior at the David Geffen School of Medicine, licensed Clinical Psychologist and sex therapist and has held the Dena Bat Yaacov Endowed Chair in Psychiatry. She is the first African American Psychologist at DGSOM to be so awarded. She also holds honorary doctorates at the University of Cape town, South Africa and at Alliant and Pepperdine Universities. Dr. Wyatt’s focus over 51 years has been on disparities the effects of trauma on mental health and has over 300 publications and six books, that include research in India,

Jamaica and East and South Africa, thus far. She was the first person of color to receive the prestigious NIH Research Scientist Career Development Award for 17 years and developed methodologies to capture the cultural context of stress and oppression overlooked in clinical research that contribute to medical and psychiatric misdiagnoses among people of color. She was the first African American to receive a license to practice Psychology in California. She founded and directed the Center for Culture, Trauma and Mental Health Disparities and the Sexual Health Programs, served as one of the Associate directors of the UCLA AIDS Institute for over two decades and has received continuous funding from NIH, private foundations and state organizations since 1980. Her landmark research chronicled the prevalence of sexual abuse among African American men and women and with her findings, helped to extend the reporting limitations of abuse and violence that has facilitated survivors to disclose their past abuse. Dr. Wyatt has provided Congressional testimony 10 times, and of those testimonies, two were before then senator Joseph Biden at the Violence Against Women hearings. Dr. Wyatt wrote “Stolen Women: Reclaiming our Sexuality, Taking Back our Lives” by Wiley and Sons, is a best-seller that details the effects of slavery and oppression on African American women today, based on 20 years of her research.  She has been instrumental in leading NIH funded research teams of color and mentoring students from diverse backgrounds and disciplines. She is well known speaker: She has given community level and professional presentations in every medium, including on Oprah Winfrey’s ‘Speak Sis’ series about Black women’s mental health.  Dr. Wyatt has received numerous awards for her work in diversity, inclusion and trauma for people of color at risk for or living with HIV. This overdue recognition could have not been possible without the creation of a close and supportive network of family, friends, a strong belief in God and the resilience to match that of her ancestors, who for two generations before her were college educated, musical and prolific speakers. She has been married to Dr. Lewis Wyatt for 60 years, a retired OB-GYN, a son, Lance, a plastic surgeon and entrepreneur and graduate of UCLA medical school and Harvard, two granddaughters, Mureya, a Fordham University freshman and Kamile, a second-year graduate student in music composition at Berklee College of Music in Boston.  Dr Wyatt also had a daughter who was also a UCLA medical school grad, Lacey who is now an angel. A scholarship for UCLA medical students that has supported 5 students, this far, has been in her name for 11 years. The legacy continues.