The Executive Board, staff, and volunteers of Medicine For Peace were saddened to learn of the recent passing of Dr. Cheryl Kennedy. Cheryl was Professor of Psychiatry at the Rutgers New Jersey Medical School, in Newark, NJ and a longtime MFP Board Member and volunteer.

Cheryl took a circuitous to acquire a nursing degree at Columbia University. After being a ward nurse for several years, Cheryl completed medical school followed by a fellowship in Psychiatry at New Jersey College of Medicine and Dentistry in Newark. She remained at that institution for thirty years, eventually becoming became Vice-Chairman of the Department of Psychiatry and Director of the residents training program.

Cheryl’s career was focused on the problems of the urban poor: caring for patients with HIV/AIDS, addictions, and victim of violence. She had extensive experience in training medical students, residents, psychiatrists, and other mental health workers in a variety of settings and cultures around NJ, the US, and in Vietnam, Myanmar, Bosnia-Hercegovina, Cuba, Guatemala, and Peru.

An early Medicine For Peace volunteer, Cheryl helped plan and initiate the much-praised Bosnian Children’s Project in Kozarac, Bosnia. Kozarac was one of the first Moslem towns ethnically cleansed by the Serbs in the Bosnian War. Cheryl recognized the desperate condition of the surviving children and helped transform the Kozarac school isn’t a safe, healing space in the disrupted life of these traumatized children. 

The Executive Board will miss Cheryl’s humor, her quick laugh, her sage advice, and most of all, her boundless heart to make life better for people in need of help.     route to find her life’s passion, psychiatry. A graduate of St. Peter’s University in education, she then went on