Michelle Rickerby MD is a board certified child and adolescent and adult psychiatrist. She graduated cum laude from the University of Notre Dame in 1989 with a degree in Pre-Medical Studies and The Program of Liberal Studies. After graduating from the University of Connecticut School of Medicine in 1993 she completed her Psychiatry Residency at the George Washington University Hospital in Washington DC. She subsequently completed her Child Psychiatry Fellowship at The Warren Alpert Medical School of Brown University during which time she worked at both Bradley Hospital and Hasbro Children’s Hospital and served as Chief Resident.
Upon the completion of residency training, between 1998-2000 Dr Rickerby founded The Crisis Service at Bradley Hospital and was also a staff psychiatrist on the consultation- liason service at Hasbro Children’s Hospital. Subsequently she focused her career on the development of the Partial Hospital Program at Hasbro Children’s Hospital. The HPHP is a program that has been nationally recognized as a gold standard model of family-based integrated care for children and teens with complex combinations of medical and psychiatric illnesses. Illness challenges treated at HPHP include eating disorders, chronic illness management complicated by psychological distress and psychiatric illness, complex pain disorders, and a range of somatoform illnesses including conversion disorder and somatic symptom disorder.
The model of family- based integrated care that Dr. Rickerby developed along with a talented team of colleagues is focused on multidisciplinary team support for patient and family empowerment over illness challenges through optimizing their perspective on the illness and maximizing teamwork across patient, family and the treatment team. Dr Rickerby has been a staff psychiatrist at HPHP since 2000, became the Clinical Director in 2004, and became the Psychiatric Director in 2011. In addition, Dr. Rickerby worked in the role of Psychiatric Director of Med/Psych Services for Hasbro Children’s Hospital from 2015-2017 providing leadership in program development on the inpatient med/psych unit as well as in the development of integrated care home-based services.
Dr. Rickerby is currently a Clinical Professor of Psychiatry and Human Behavior at The Warren Alpert School of Medicine of Brown University. She is the Director of Family Therapy Training for the residents in the Child Psychiatry and Triple Board Residency Programs. In addition, she is nationally recognized as an expert in family-based integrated care and has served as a consultant for hospital systems across the country aiming to establish programs modeled after the HPHP. She is a Board Member of The Family Process Institute as well as the The Family Committee of The American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry.
Starting in June 2018 Dr. Rickerby transitioned to community-based practice with a focus on providing outpatient family-based integrated care as well as on program development consultation and cross-disciplinary family therapy training.