Laila Knio

Hi there! I’m Laila. I was born in Beirut, Lebanon and raised in a village south of the capital by a Lebanese/Sunni Muslimdad and North Carolinian/Methodist mom. I grew up with a great appreciation for the multiplicity of identity –the way that we are formed by people, place, story, and language. I moved to North Carolina with my family when I was 11 years old, following the July War of 2006. I attended NC State University on a Park Scholarship, majoring in Psychology and minoring in French. I spent two summers in France, one studying abroad at the Université Catholiquede Lille and another conducting research at the Pasteur Institute in Paris. While attending medical school at UNC-Chapel Hill I discovered that my academic interests, which lie at the intersection of healthcare and story, are well-suited for conducting qualitative research. I worked with a medical anthropologist to study the impact of Vermont's Act 39 (legalizing physician aid-in-dying) on caregivers –and, more recently –the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on moral stress among frontline physicians in NYC and New Orleans. I took a gap year between my MS3and MS4years to complete an MS in Narrative Medicine at Columbia University. My scholarship from this year is published in Intima, Synapsis, Voices in Bioethics, and KevinMD. Since graduating, I have administered Narrative Medicine workshops in various settings, including a didactics series for Child and Adolescent Psychiatry and Hematology-Oncology Fellows at UNC, and two parallel workshop series (exploring the phenomenology of identity) for patients living with eating disorders and the providers who care for them. I am interested in work that grazes the space between psychiatry and medicine, including CL-psychiatry, eating disorders, and palliative care. In my free time I enjoy reading and writing creative nonfiction, propagating houseplants, and learning to play the cello. I don’t have any furry friends, but I do have a (brand new) husband who sports a killer beard, which maybe counts. I am excited and honored to be joining Yale Psychiatry!