Heidi Zetzer and Himadhari Sharma

Heidi Zetzer, Director of the Hosford Clinc, presents Himadhari Sharma with her award

Himadhari Sharma, graduate student at the Gevirtz School at UC Santa Barbara, has been awarded the 2018-19 Ray E. Hosford Award for Excellence in Professional Behavior. This award is for service she performed at the Hosford Counseling and Psychological Services Clinic at UC Santa Barbara.

Himadhari Sharma is a Counseling, Clinical, and School psychology doctoral student, with an emphasis in Counseling Psychology, working under Dr. Andrés Consoli. Originally from the Twin Cities, Minnesota, she received an undergraduate in business with a specialization in marketing from the University of Minnesota in 2010. After which she worked in the healthcare service industry for four years. She completed her masters in psychology with an emphasis in clinical psychology from New York University (NYU) in 2017. There she conducted research in the realm of hearing voices, looking at various topics, such as stigma, within the general population. She also worked in an intensive outpatient clinic for eating disorder patients at Mount Sinai Hospital as well as completed an internship at the National Institute of Mental Health and Neuroscience (NIMHANS) in Bangalore, India.  She has also worked with the Freedom Project, in Bangalore, India, with human trafficking victims. Himadhari has also served on the board of directors for myHealth, a non-profit reproductive and mental health clinic, as well as on the public policy board for the YWCA, Minnesota. Her current interests include multicultural psychology, access, and utilization for mental health services among minority populations, (especially Asian populations), cross-cultural/international psychology, as well as alternative treatment and therapy options.

The Hosford Counseling & Psychological Services Clinic is a university-based community clinic that is designed to provide developmentally appropriate and culturally sensitive, low-cost individual, couple, family, and group psychological treatment and testing/assessment services to people living within the central coast community. The Hosford Clinic serves as a training site for students in the Department of Counseling, Clinical, and School Psychology (CCSP) of UC Santa Barbara and as a clinical-research facility for the faculty and students of the CCSP Department. It also strives to provide educational, consultation, and training services to professional and paraprofessional clinicians and educators in the tri-counties.