This Women’s History Month we are featuring current and former DHEC employees who have made an impact in our state. 

Today we feature Dr. Katherine Richardson, Regional Medical Director for the Lowcountry. 

Born in Columbia, Dr. Katy (as she is known by her staff) grew up around family in a small-town community when her father moved their family to his hometown of Barnwell, S.C.  

Dr. Richardson is an alumni of Duke University, where she designed her own undergraduate major, “Social Justice: The South as a Case Study.” In this study path, she took courses on ethics, public policy, history and Southern literature. 

After graduating from Duke, she followed her childhood dream of being a doctor and went to medical school at the Stanford University School of Medicine in California. 

“Though few students there went into primary care, I was committed to that path after growing up in a small town where all the doctors were primary care physicians,” Dr. Richardson said. 

She later received her MPH from Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. 

Before her medical school graduation, she married her college sweetheart (also a medical school student), and together they moved to Seattle for their residency before moving back to the East Coast. From there they went to Chapel Hill, N.C.; Baltimore, MD; and finally settled in Charleston, S.C. in 2011. 

A primary care physician until 2015, Dr. Richardson was drawn to public health because of the impact it could have on the community and the ability it has to provide a safe and healthy environment for all to thrive. 

“For family physicians, a fundamental tenet is caring for the patient in relation to their family and community as well as caring for all members of the family across the life span,” Dr. Richardson said. “I think interest in public health flows naturally from this tenet as caring for an individual in the context of their family and community also recalls that it ‘takes a village to raise a child.’”  

Dr. Richardson has served as the Regional Medical Director for the Lowcountry (which covers Allendale, Bamberg, Berkeley, Beaufort, Calhoun, Charleston, Colleton, Dorchester, Hampton, Jasper and Orangeburg counties) since 2015.  

She is board certified by the American Board of Family Practice and has served in advisory roles on a wide variety of committees, boards and organizations, including the SC Viral Hepatitis Committee; Charleston County Addiction Crisis Task Force; SC Violent Death Reporting System Advisory Group; MUSC Turning the Tide Violence Intervention Program advisory board; and the SC Adolescent Immunizations Task Force, among others.  

She also served as a subject matter expert in DHEC’s Electronic Health Record (EHR) implementation. 

In her free time, Dr. Richardson likes to read, travel, hike, garden, birdwatch and spend time with her husband and three children. 

We will be featuring more of our Regional Medical Directors later this month for National Doctor’s Day on March 30. 

Note: A special thanks to Natasha Piehota, Lowcountry Epidemiologist Nurse II, who provided us with a feature she wrote on Dr. Richardson for the January 2024 issue of EpiUpdates, DHEC’s internal epidemiology newsletter. Quotes from Dr. Richardson were retrieved from this article.