Brian K. Kennedy

Brian K. Kennedy, PhD, is the President and CEO of the Buck Institute for Research on Aging in Novato, California, having started in July, 2010. Formerly, he was an Associate Professor in the Department of Biochemistry at the University of Washington. He obtained his PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1996. It was during his graduate studies with Dr. Leonard Guarente that he initiated studies of the biology of aging, where he identified Sirtuins as key modulators of longevity in yeast. One focus of his current lab still centers on Sir2 and aging. After a Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Massachusetts General Hospital Cancer Center, where he studied mechanisms of tumor suppression, he began an independent position at the University of Washington and turned his focus back to aging biology. Currently his lab uses a variety of model organisms including yeast, worms and mice to identify the conserved evolutionary pathways that modulate aging and study them from a mechanistic perspective. He has had a major role in understanding how the TOR pathway and the drug rapamycin influence aging. He is also an Affiliate faculty member at the University of Washington and a visiting professor at the Guangdong Medical College Aging Research Institute in China. Dr. Kennedy has published over 80 manuscripts in prestigious journals including Cell, Nature, Science, Genes & Development and PNAS. He has presented his work nationally and abroad at over 40 invited seminars during the last 3 years, and his work has been supported by several grants from agencies such and foundations as the National Institute of Aging, the Department of Defense, the Ellison Medical Foundation, the American Federation for Aging Research, the Glenn Foundation and others. He was also recognized as a Searle Scholar from 2003-2006. In 2009, he was named the Vincent Cristofalo Rising Star in Aging Research by the American Federation for Aging Research. In 2010, he was given the Nathan Shock Award by the National Institute of Aging. Dr. Kennedy has served on the NIH Cellular Mechanisms of Aging and Development study section since 2006, acting as Committee Chair since 2010. He has also served on the grant review committee for American Federation for Aging Research Grants since 2006. He has acted as an Associate Editor for the Journal of Gerontology: Biological Science since 2006 and Cell Cycle since 2010. Currently, he is co-Editor-in Chief of Aging Cell. Finally, Dr. Kennedy has served as a consultant for Biotech and Pharmaceutical companies and is a co-Founder of the Nuvita Animal Health Corporation.