Michael Kennedy

Michael A. Kennedy, Ph.D, Ohio Eminent Scholar and Professor (Chemistry and Biochemistry) Miami University Dr. Kennedy is a native of New Philadelphia, Ohio and received his B.S in chemistry from Muskingum College (Ohio) in 1984. He received his Ph.D. in physical chemistry from the University of South Carolina, Columbia, in 1989 where he received the Guy F. Lipscomb award for Excellence in Chemistry. From 1989-1990, he was a postdoctoral fellow in the Chemistry Department at the University of California, San Diego where he worked on development of wide-line solid-state nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy methods. From 1990-1993, he was a postdoctoral fellow in the Chemistry Department at the University of Washington, Seattle, where he learned how to use solution-state NMR spectroscopy to study DNA structure and dynamics. During this time, he was supported by a Department of Energy Hollaender Distinguished Postdoctoral Fellowship. From 1993 until 2006, Dr. Kennedy was a Principal Investigator in the Macromolecular Structure and Dynamics group within the Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) in Richland, WA. During this time, he built an internationally recognized program in NMR-based structural biology, serving as the PI on a program project grant from the Department of Energy’s Office of Health and Environmental Research. He also organized a series of international workshops on Structural Genomics. As a result of these efforts, Kennedy served as Co-Principal Investigator in the North East Structural Genomics (NESG) Consortium, one of four large scale production centers in the National Institutes of Health’s Protein Structure Initiative, since 2000, 2000 till 2015. During this contiguous 15-year period of funding, the NESG consortium received more than $100 million in NIH funding. In the Fall of 2006, Kennedy moved from PNNL to Miami University where he assumed the position of Ohio Eminent Scholar and Full Professor in Chemistry and Biochemistry. Since 2006, in additional to continuing his NIH funded program in Structural Genomics, Kennedy established numerous collaborations with physicians at the Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center and the University of Cincinnati Medical Hospital to focus on biomarker discover for childhood and adult diseases with a special emphasis on pancreatic cancer. In 2010, Kennedy’s Eminent Scholar laboratory was designated an Ohio Center of Excellence in Biomedicine in Structural Biology and Metabonomics. Kennedy has served as director of this Center of Excellence since its designation in 2010. In 2011, Kennedy was awarded a three-year NIH grant to use a transgenic mouse model to search for biomarkers for early detection of pancreatic cancer. Kennedy has more than 30 years experience in the development and application of solution- and solid-state NMR spectroscopy techniques to problems related to human health and disease. His work has resulted in more than 187 peer-reviewed publications since 1989 and he has given ~80 invited presentations around the world. A major goal of his current research is to use metabolic profiling to discover biomarkers for human diseases. Over the last several years, he has developed novel statistics methodologies for analysis of NMR-based metabonomics data that have been adopted and integrated into one of the widely used commercial AMIX software package for analysis of NMR metabonomics data provided by Bruker Biospin, Inc. Recently, his group has also focused on using NMR and X-ray crystallography to study rotavirus host-cell receptor interactions to better understand rotavirus host ranges and rotavirus evolution. Over the last 10 years, the Kennedy group has also been developing engineered oncolytic viruses to treat pancreatic cancer, which has resulted in multiple patents, as listed below. In January of 2016, Dr. Kennedy received at U.S. Patent entitled "Use of HMGA-Targeted Aptamers to Suppress Carcinogenic Activity and Increase Sensitivity to Chemotherapy in Human Cancer Cells", Patent No: US 9,233,119 B2 On October 27, 2020, Dr. Kennedy received a U.S. Patent entitled "Engineered Oncolytic Viruses Containing Hyper-Binding Sites To Sequester And Suppress Activity Of Oncogenic Transcription Factors As A Novel Treatment For Human Cancer", Patent No: US 10,813,957 B2