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Dr. Kenna received her undergraduate degree from the University of Pennsylvania and her MD from Boston University School of Medicine. She completed a residency in Otolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences and did her Pediatric Otolaryngology Fellowship training at the Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh (University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine). She completed a Master’s in Public Health degree (MPH) in the area of Clinical Effectiveness at the Harvard School of Public Health in 2005.
Before coming to Boston Children’s, Dr. Kenna was on the academic faculty at Children’s Hospital Pittsburgh and Yale University School of Medicine. Dr. Kenna has been a member of the Pediatric Otolaryngology faculty at Boston Children’s Hospital since 1995. She co-founded the Boston Children’s Hospital Pediatric Cochlear Implant Program, and was its Director from 1995-2003. Since 2003, she has been the Director of Clinical Research in the Dept. of Otolaryngology, Boston Children’s Hospital, and is Director of the Hearing Loss Program.
Dr. Kenna’s early research focused on otitis media, and she and her group published several articles demonstrating that chronic suppurative otitis media could be managed medically, rather than surgically, changing the standard of care. Over the past 2 decades, she has focused on the causes of pediatric hearing loss, including genetics, congenital cytomegalovirus, structural anomalies of the temporal bone, and hearing loss secondary to ototoxicity in patients with Cystic Fibrosis. She is a long-standing member of the Universal Newborn Hearing Screening Advisory Committee of the MA Dept. of Public Health, and is a founding member of the Harvard Medical School Center for Hereditary Deafness, the MA Coalition for Congenital CMV, and of the American Society for Pediatric Otolaryngology (ASPO).