Richard C. Veith, MD is a Seattle native who has spent his academic career at the UW School of Medicine where he received his MD and completed an Internal Medicine Internship and Psychiatry Residency. In 1977 he joined the faculty of the UW Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences and was based at the Seattle VA Puget Sound. He was Director, VA Geriatric Research, Education, and Clinical Center from 1987-1998. He served as Chair of the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences from 1998-2014. From 2003 - 2006, he served as President, UW Medicine Physicians. In 2011, he was appointed by US Secretary for Veterans Affairs Shinseki to Chair the VA Geriatrics and Gerontology Advisory Committee, a congressionally mandated oversight committee for Department of Veterans Affairs, and served until 2016.

Dr. Veith has conducted extensive research on the treatment of depression in patients with heart disease and stroke. Later in his career he conducted a 4-year grant to explore the effectiveness of psychiatric and pain medicine/opioid use consultations delivered via telemedicine in rural community health clinics in Washington State.  His international global mental health work has been focused in Vietnam and Cambodia where he and colleagues are promoting the implementation the collaborative care model that integrates medical and mental health care in the primary care setting. He is providing clinical training, technical assistance, and capacity building efforts with psychiatrists, primary care practitioners, psychologists, social workers, and other health professionals at clinical settings, universities, and government ministries. With UW Global Health colleagues, he contributed to the first study in Cambodia to validate the PHQ-9 and GAD-7, widely used rating scales for depression and anxiety, respectively, and developed a short screening measure for detecting emotional distress, including depression, anxiety, and post-traumatic stress.