Understand what shaped the person.
Begin with development, relationships, culture, adversity, and the adaptations that once protected a person but may now keep them stuck.
Medical student · Ann Arbor, Michigan
Understand the mind. Change the trajectory.
I’m Jack Hennessey, an MD student at the University of Michigan interested in holistic, preventive, and high-performance health: care that begins with what shaped a person, helps restore agency, and connects psychological change to lasting physical health.
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About
Start with the person’s story. Work outward from there.
Symptoms matter, but they are not the whole explanation. I am drawn to a mind-first approach that asks how development, trauma, relationships, culture, and repeated adaptations shaped the person in front of us—and how insight can become greater agency, connection, and capacity to live well.
Preventive medicine follows from that work. When someone can understand their patterns and act with more freedom, sleep, exercise, nutrition, metabolic health, and long-term risk become part of the same clinical picture. I hope to build a rigorous, deeply human practice that works from mind to body and from root causes to durable change.
- Holistic & preventive health
- High performance & psychological resilience
- Psychiatry, psychotherapy & behavior change
- Interventional & emerging psychiatric care
- Sleep, exercise & metabolic health
- Precision medicine & responsible AI
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Path to medicine
I came to medicine by following a question from systems to people.
Systems taught me where health is distributed. Relationships taught me how healing happens.
Then
Before medical school, I imagined a life in urban policy. I studied how infrastructure, climate, socioeconomic inequality, and political choices shape who gets to live safely and well. That work taught me to see the forces surrounding a person—but it also left me wanting a relationship with the person at the center.
The turn
The shift toward medicine was gradual, then increasingly clear. Working alongside the Yavapai Apache Nation deepened my respect for ways of understanding health that do not separate an individual from family, place, and community. Patient narrative and clinical research made the next step concrete: I wanted to care for people directly.
Now
Medicine lets me carry a systems view into an interpersonal practice. I am drawn to the two-way nature of care—the possibility that helping another person change course also changes the clinician—and to protecting possibility before disease, disconnection, or despair closes it down.
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Direction
A mind-first model of upstream care.
Inspired by Bruce Perry’s attention to experience and adaptation, Paul Conti’s focus on agency and generative drive, and Peter Attia’s long-horizon approach to healthspan.
Build the capacity to choose differently.
Use psychotherapy and rigorous psychiatric care to strengthen self-understanding, emotional flexibility, purpose, connection, and generative drive.
Turn psychological progress into longer healthspan.
Connect the work of the mind to sleep, exercise, metabolic health, substance use, and the long-term protection of cognitive and physical function.
Use new tools without surrendering judgment.
Explore measurement, responsible AI, and emerging interventions where they deepen clinical insight and relationship rather than substitute for either.
Movement · community · performance
Performance is lived, not abstract.
I am interested in health that expands what a person can do—with others and over time. Training, recovery, friendship, and the willingness to keep showing up belong inside the same view of health.
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Selected work
Current inquiry and formative work.
A selective record of projects that shape how I think about medicine, psychiatry, human performance, culture, and community.
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Eating, exercise, and solitude in Japan
Funded autoethnographic project
Documenting how a health-conscious medical trainee negotiates discipline, pleasure, movement, appetite, solitude, and identity while traveling alone. The project is being developed toward a conference presentation and peer-reviewed medical-humanities publication.
02
Wolverine Street Medicine
Special Projects Coordinator
Building a Community Advisory Board and helping coordinate outreach in Ann Arbor and Detroit, with programming shaped by the priorities of people experiencing homelessness.
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Addictive, Compulsive, and Impulsive Disorders Lab
Clinical Research Coordinator · University of Chicago
Coordinated participant-facing and regulatory work across five clinical trials, including studies of psilocybin, naltrexone, and buprenorphine for addiction and compulsive disorders.
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My Life, My Story
Patient Interviewer · UM St. Joseph Medical Center
Conducted trauma-informed narrative interviews with long-term care patients, translating their life stories into a form that could travel with the medical record.
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Yavapai Apache Nation
Community Research Coordinator · AmeriCorps VISTA
Facilitated focus groups with Native parents about educational needs and barriers, then synthesized the findings into recommendations for community and organizational partners.
06
Global Cities Scholars Program
Honors Thesis Researcher · Georgetown University
Used qualitative interviews to examine equity in a United Nations urban climate-adaptation initiative in Kisumu, Kenya, and presented the work at Georgetown’s Student Research Summit.
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Education
Training shaped by science, policy, story, and place.
An interdisciplinary route to medicine, with enduring interests in cities, equity, culture, and the interior life of patients and clinicians.
University of Michigan Medical School
Doctor of Medicine
Ann Arbor, MichiganGoucher College
Post-Baccalaureate Premedical Program
Towson, MarylandGeorgetown University
B.S., Science, Technology & International Affairs
Washington, D.C.
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Service & leadership
Showing up, building trust, and making room for others.
Doctors of Tomorrow
Mentor
Best Buddies Citizens
Buddy
MDurance
Treasurer
Creating Adventurous & Mindful Physicians
Base Camp Coordinator
Let’s connect
Let’s talk about human health, psychiatry, or the future of care.
I’m glad to hear from people working across integrative psychiatry, psychotherapy, high performance, preventive health, emerging therapeutics, and responsible technology.