Dr. Ye Kyung Song, MD, PhD
(she/her)
Psychiatry MD, Medical Humanities PhD
Founding Program Director
Shannon Health/Texas A&M Psychiatry Residency Program
Dr. Ye Kyung (“Yekki”) Song is a board-certified psychiatrist with both an M.D. and a Ph.D. in medical humanities and ethics from the University of Texas Medical Branch. She completed her Psychiatry residency at Duke University, continuing her ethics scholarship as a Trent Center Clinical Ethics Fellow and completing additional training in medical teaching through the Clinician Educator track.
She has served as faculty at UT Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas, supervising residents and medical students on a core clinical rotation at Clements University Hospital, and continues to serve as adjunct faculty in providing psychotherapy supervision for resident physicians.
BiographyScholarshipDr. Song's scholarship centers on medical education and the existential and moral dimensions of clinical training. Selected works:
Ph.D. Dissertation: “Expressions of Medical Student Burnout on Reddit: An Autonetnographic Study of /r/medicalschool”
Memes in Medical Education: Making Sense of Professional Authorityin Medical Anthropology Theory. 2019.
"This Isn't Being a Doctor." - Qualitative Inquiry into the Existential Dimensions of Medical Student Burnoutin Medical Science Educator. 2020.
Moral Injury and Burnout in Health Care Professionals during the COVID-19 Pandemic in The Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease. 2021.
Morally Injurious Experiences and Emotions of Health Care Professionals during the COVID-19 Pandemic before Vaccine Availability in JAMA Network Open. 2021.
Psychiatry Resident Physicians Experience Personal and Professional Grief, Burnout and Depression: Results From a National Surveyin American Journal of Hospice and Palliative Medicine. 2025.
Full publication list is available on her Web of Science and Google Scholar profiles.
Dr. Song has experience in building curricula, teaching didactics, and facilitating small groups across psychiatry and the medical humanities. Her full teaching portfolio can be found here.
Drawing on her training at the intersection of medicine and the humanities, she looks forward to building a program at Shannon Health rooted in the Concho Valley, a health professional shortage area. The mission of the Shannon Psychiatry Residency Program, in partnership with Texas A&M Vashisht School of Medicine, is to train exceptional psychiatrists who deliver evidence-based, compassionate, and patient-centered care. Our program fosters the development of physicians committed to service, advocacy, and leadership through comprehensive clinical training in rural and underserved settings. By addressing health disparities and the behavioral health needs of West Texas, residents graduate as clinically excellent physicians and effective advocates and leaders for the communities they serve.
Teaching