Intervene while more is still possible.
Using risk, exercise, sleep, metabolic health, and behavior change to extend healthspan—not merely respond after disease has taken hold.
Medical student · Ann Arbor, Michigan
The best medicine treats illness—and works upstream of it.
I’m Jack Hennessey, an MD student at the University of Michigan interested in preventive medicine and psychiatry: protecting healthspan, understanding the interior life, and helping people change course before illness narrows what is possible.
01
About
Treat disease seriously. Start earlier. See the whole person.
I am drawn to preventive medicine’s basic wager: the best time to confront chronic disease is before it fully declares itself. That means paying close attention to risk, exercise, sleep, metabolic health, behavior, and the conditions that make durable change possible.
Psychiatry belongs inside that upstream view. Mood, attention, addiction, trauma, purpose, and relationships shape whether a person can act on what medicine knows. I hope to build a clinically rigorous practice that brings prevention and psychiatry into the same frame while contributing selectively to research and responsible innovation.
- Preventive medicine & healthspan
- Psychiatry & psychotherapy
- Psychedelic & interventional care
- Precision medicine & responsible AI
- Exercise, metabolic health & behavior change
- Culture, cities & community
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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 suddenly 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. A transformative psychedelic experience crystallized what had been taking shape for years: 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 future practice built across four connected domains.
Prevention and psychiatry meet in the same question: what helps a person remain capable of building a life they want to inhabit?
Take interior life as seriously as physiology.
Building depth in psychotherapy, addiction medicine, and emerging interventions while staying attentive to meaning, agency, and relationship.
Use new tools without surrendering judgment.
Exploring responsible AI, measurement, and investment where technology strengthens rather than substitutes for clinical relationship.
Health is never only individual.
Attending to family, culture, cities, socioeconomic conditions, and belonging as active parts of physical and mental health.
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Selected work
Current inquiry and formative work.
A selective record of projects that shape how I think about medicine, mental health, culture, and community.
01
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.
03
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.
04
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.
05
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 prevention, psychiatry, or the future of care.
I’m glad to hear from people working across preventive health, clinical care, emerging therapeutics, responsible technology, and community health.