Sonyia Richardson is an Assistant Professor at the UNC School of Social Work and holds a secondary appointment with the UNC Department of Psychiatry. Richardson is a dedicated health equity scholar whose research focuses on identifying and removing barriers (practical, systemic, organizational and cultural) to mental health treatment for Black youth and developing interventions to support their persistence in mental health treatment. As a community-engaged researcher and clinician with more than 20 years of experience, she has extensive expertise in generating knowledge to enhance wellness among diverse populations and creating interventions that tend to their specific cultural needs. Richardson has secured competitive funding from the National Institute of Mental Health and the American Educational Research Association-National Science Foundation grants program. Additionally, she participated as a fellow with the National Institute of Minority Health Disparities (NIMHD) Health Disparities Institute, National Institute of Health Summer Institute on Randomized Behavioral Clinical Trials, Researcher Resiliency Training Program at Washington University in St. Louis, and the Institute of Mixture Modeling for Equity Oriented Scholars with the University of California Santa Barbara.