HOLLY POWELL KENNEDY

Dr. Kennedy is a 1985 graduate of Frontier. Holly came to the Frontier Nursing Service in the summer of 1978 for an internship as a family nurse practitioner student from the Medical College of Georgia.  She then stayed on to work for Frontier Nursing Service in primary care and later enrolled in the midwifery program.

As an internationally known midwifery researcher and leader Dr. Kennedy is the first person to be appointed as the Varney Professor of Midwifery at Yale in 2009. She came to the position with broad experiences as a clinician, researcher, educator, policymaker and leader in a variety of settings. Collectively these experiences have shaped her current vision of academic and clinical scholarship in US maternal-child health care.

She is Past-President of the American College of Nurse-Midwives (ACNM), the professional association representing Certified Nurse-Midwives and Certified Midwives in the US.

Dr. Kennedy received a diploma in nursing from Miami Valley Hospital School of Nursing, Dayton, Ohio, a bachelor’s degree from Chaminade University, Honolulu, HI, a master’s degree as a family nurse practitioner from the Medical College of Georgia, a certificate of midwifery from the Frontier School of Midwifery & Family Nursing, Hyden, KY and a doctorate in nursing from the University of Rhode Island. She has held academic positions at the University of Rhode Island and most recently at the University of California San Francisco. She holds visiting faculty appointments at King’s College London and the University of Basel, Switzerland.