Bruny Kenou

Bruny Kenou is a mental health activist and medical student at the George Washington School of Medicine and Health Sciences who graduated from Duke University in 2020 with a Distinction in Neuroscience. She has worked as a researcher at the National Institutes of Mental Health (NIMH) and the Duke Institute of Brain Sciences and as an Advisor on Youth Mental Health for the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI). She currently is a researcher with the Kennedy Krieger Institute as Ferguson RISE Fellow working in the Adolescent Psychiatry Lab of Dr. Marcos Grados where she is exploring the genetic markers associated with OCD and PTSD.

Using technology to optimize behavioral health outcomes, she has used her lived experience with mental illness as a springboard for action and advocacy. She co-founded a virtual peer-to-peer mental health support program at Duke University called DukeLine.

Since graduating, she has volunteered as a Data Analyst for Lean On Me, a non-profit peer text support organization, and in 2020, founded an organization called the Lay Mental Health Advocates, which focused on community mental health education and the use of virtual patient advocacy to improve the health outcomes of communities. Bruny hopes to continue advocating for social and medical justice in medical school as an aspiring physician, researcher, policymaker, and public health official.