Markita Barideaux, LCSW (she/her) is Director of Behavioral Health for EMBRACE: Perinatal Integrated Care in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at the University of California, San Francisco. Her work sits at the intersection of clinical care, community practice, and systems transformation, with a central focus on perinatal mental health, infant and early childhood mental health (IECMH), and reproductive justice.

At UCSF, Markita leads the development and implementation of a culturally responsive, interdisciplinary model of care designed to address persistent inequities in maternal health outcomes. EMBRACE integrates behavioral health into prenatal and postpartum care, centers relational practice, and strengthens connections between hospital and community-based systems. Under her leadership, the program has sustained approximately $3M in annual funding and contributed to a $30M, five-year county-level investment in perinatal mental health services across San Francisco. She also serves as Clinical Social Work Manager with the Child Trauma Research Program, where she has been on staff since 2010 and provides clinical services, supervision, and national training in Child-Parent Psychotherapy.

Markita is the developer of Safe Passage, an emerging care-to-policy translation model that integrates clinical intervention, workforce development, cultural and spiritual healing practices, and policy alignment. The model reflects her broader commitment to building scalable ecosystems of care that move beyond treatment toward transformation. She also leads the San Francisco Black Birthworkers and Black Maternal Mental Health Collaborative, a coordinating body supporting racially concordant, multidisciplinary perinatal care.

A graduate of Brown University (BA, Human Biology) and California State University, East Bay (MSW, Children, Youth, and Families), Markita completed her clinical fellowship at UCSF in 2012 and has been licensed in California since 2015. She holds advisory roles with ZERO TO THREE’s IECMH Clinical Workforce Diversity Collective and the Irving Harris Foundation Professional Development Network’s Reproductive Health Justice Committee, and has contributed to publications in the Infant Mental Health Journal, Maternal and Child Health Journal, and the ZERO TO THREE Journal.

Her honors include the 2020 ZERO TO THREE Emerging Leadership Award, the 2015 UCSF Chancellor Award for Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Leadership, and recognition as a UCSF Dean’s Diversity Leader. Markita’s work is anchored in the conviction that meaningful change requires alignment across clinical practice, community wisdom, and institutional systems—and that families deserve to be supported with dignity, relational care, and the conditions necessary to thrive.