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Katherine McKenzie, MD, FACP

Faculty Member at Yale Medical School | Director of the Yale Center for Asylum Medicine

Katherine C. McKenzie, MD, FACP is a faculty member at Yale School of Medicine and the director of the Yale Center for Asylum Medicine (YCAM).  She has practiced medicine at Yale for over 25 years. She teaches undergraduates, students, and residents, and is a member of Yale Refugee Health Program. She is a physician advocate for social justice and human rights.

Dr. McKenzie founded and directs YCAM. In this capacity, she has performed forensic evaluations of asylum seekers at Yale and in detention facilities, and has testified as an expert witness in immigration court for individuals referred by law schools, human rights organizations, and immigration attorneys. She leads the asylum medicine teaching program for trainees and faculty at Yale, mentors healthcare providers across the US, and lectures extensively nationally and internationally on topics of asylum, detention, and physician advocacy. She is an expert advisor for Physicians for Human Rights and serves on the boards of the Society for Refugee Healthcare Providers, Project Access New Haven, and Integrated Refugee and Immigrants Services. She is involved in medical-legal partnerships and collaborates with attorneys on civil litigation that supports human rights. She is a founder and director of the Society of Asylum Medicine.

She has written reviews, clinical case reports and opinion essays in publications including the New England Journal of Medicine, the Journal of the American Medical Association, the Journal of General Internal Medicine, the British Medical Journal, Time magazine and CNN, among many others.

At Yale, she received the Leonard B. Tow Award for Humanism in Medicine and the Faculty Award for Achievement in Clinical Care. She has been named a “Top Doctor” for many years by Connecticut Magazine.  She is a Fellow of the American College of Physicians and has been certified with the American Board of Internal Medicine since 1995. 

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