Phelan Maruca-Sullivan, MD, assistant professor of psychiatry, and Katherine “Kiki” Kennedy, MD, clinical professor of psychiatry, have been honored as the 2025 recipients of the prestigious Irma Bland, MD, Certificate of Excellence in Teaching Residents.
The award is presented by the American Psychiatric Association and its Council on Medical Education and Lifelong Learning. It is awarded to faculty for their “outstanding and sustaining contributions” to the Yale Psychiatry Residency Program.
The award is named in memory of Dr. Irma Bland, a distinguished figure in mental health who passed away in 2003. Dr. Bland's innovative and significant contributions to psychiatric education are celebrated through this award, perpetuating her legacy in the field.
Maruca-Sullivan is co-director of site training for VA Connecticut and director of the PGY3 Centralized Didactics and the VA PGY-2 Geropsychiatry Rotation. She is a geriatric psychiatrist with particular interest in refractory mood disorders and is actively involved in resident education and supervision in the Geropsychiatry Clinic, Neuropsychiatry Clinic, and Treatment Refractory Depression Clinic/Ketamine Clinic at VA Connecticut.
This year she led the development of the new Geropsychiatry Distinction Track and Geropsychiatry Elective Rotation. Along with her colleagues on the Centralized Didactics Leadership Team, she also implemented an ambitious redesign of the residency program’s four-year didactics curriculum.
Kennedy is a board-certified adult psychiatrist in private practice in New Haven. Since 2016, she has developed and led the Yale Legislative Advocacy Program within Yale School of Medicine. The program equips trainees with advocacy skills and has contributed to the passage of multiple bills by the Connecticut General Assembly.
Within the Yale Department of Psychiatry, she co-leads the Advocacy Track within the Health Equity Curriculum, serves as faculty co-leader of the Psychotherapy Distinction Track, and supervises psychiatry residents in psychotherapy in the Yale Long-term Care Clinic. She also serves as a faculty mentor for PEPSY (Psychotherapy Education and Peer Supervision at Yale), the Residents’ Psychotherapy Interest Group, MHAY (Mental Health Advocacy at Yale), and the Residents’ Advocacy Interest Group, and is a deputy house faculty leader for Serotonin House.
Kennedy is a past recipient of the Yale Department of Psychiatry’s Outstanding Clinical Faculty Award.