Dr. Kathleen Kennedy is the founding director of the Center for Minority Health and Health Disparities Research and Education (CMHDRE) at Xavier University of Louisiana College of Pharmacy where she continues to provide leadership in the development of the research infrastructure necessary to support health disparities research, education, and training. Holding the Malcolm Ellington Endowed professorship in Health Disparities, Dr. Kennedy has worked for over 20 years on research focused on community engagement, eliminating health disparities, and achieving health equity. In 2020, she was appointed to the Executive Committee of the Louisiana Health Equity Task Force by Governor John Bel Edwards. There she worked on a subcommittee which worked to redesign the state health status dashboard to emphasize the importance of using health informatics and data storytelling to engage the community to improve health outcomes. In 2023, honoring the legacy of former congressional leader and civil rights icon John Lewis, the NIMH established the John Lewis NIMHD Research Endowment. Dr. Kennedy and her team at Xavier successfully competed for this award totally $20M over five years. With this funding, the Center will establish the Precision Medicine, Education, Data Informatics and Community Translation (PREDICT) Institute, a comprehensive programmatic initiative, created to develop a holistic and replicable framework for the utilization of electronic health data and community translation to affect the decision-making process to improve health outcomes.

To encourage interprofessional collaboration to address health disparities, in 2007 Dr. Kennedy established the first national health disparities conference for mid-level providers to address the successful translation of research into effective models of practice to impact policy and change behaviors in the broader community. This conference continues annually.

Dr. Kennedy earned the Doctor of Pharmacy degree from the University of California, San Francisco and completed a residency in Pharmacy Practice at the University of California Hospitals and Clinics with her research emphasis on infectious diseases. She served as a Co-Principal Investigator for the Tulane-Xavier NCI Cancer Health Disparities grant and Director of the Community Engagement and Outreach Core for the Louisiana Clinical and Translational Sciences Center for the state of Louisiana.

She was recognized nationally, along with research colleagues at Xavier, with the Rufus A. Lyman award by the American Association of Colleges of Pharmacy for a publication on the use of an instrument to assess the perceived level of cultural competence of students to guide curriculum development and by the American Society of Health System Pharmacists-Association of Black Health System Pharmacists (ASHP-ABHP) with the Joint Leadership Award for exceptional leadership to reduce racial and ethnic disparities in healthcare.

Dr. Kennedy was appointed Dean of the College of Pharmacy in 2010.