Bibhav Acharya, MD

Bibhav Acharya (BEE-vub ah-CHAR-yuh) is a Professor of Psychiatry at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) and the founding Director of the UCSF Psychiatry HEAL Fellowship in Global Mental Health. He has extensive experience in developing, testing, and scaling innovative interventions to improve outcomes for mental health, non-communicable diseases, and other complex conditions such as domestic violence.

He has led multiple studies funded by philanthropic sources and NIH, including adapting and implementing the collaborative care model; training community health workers in using digital health interventions for chronic diseases such as depression, anxiety, hypertension, diabetes, and HIV; training nurses to reduce alcohol use and intimate partner violence using motivational interviewing and behavioral couple’s therapy; and engaging husbands and mothers-in-law to reduce domestic violence and depression among young married women.

He is the Founding Director of UCSF Psychiatry HEAL Fellowship in Global Mental Health (http://tiny.ucsf.edu/GMH), which trains psychiatrists as leaders in clinical practice, capacity building, and health systems-strengthening in low-resource settings in the United States (Navajo Nation) and abroad (including rural Nepal and Mexico).

He is the co-founder and mental health advisor of Possible (www.possiblehealth.org), a non-profit organization that has been testing and scaling up innovative health interventions with over $40 million invested since 2007 in partnership with the Nepali Government and local organizations.

He co-edited a 2024 book that convened insights from over 70 collaborators: "Global Mental Health Training and Practice: An Introductory Framework."

Bibhav was born and raised in Nepal and arrived in the United States to attend Haverford College on a full scholarship. He was a Howard Hughes Science and Society Scholar in public health studying HIV interventions in Thailand. He has conducted research for the New York State Department of Health AIDS Institute to improve the quality of care for federally-funded HIV services. He received his MD from Yale University and research residency training in general adult psychiatry from University of California, San Francisco, where he conducted research under NIMH-R25 and completed a certificate program in Implementation Science from UCSF Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics.