Dr. Eileen Kennedy is making her mark in research and at the College of Pharmacy.

In the last year-and-a-half, she has been awarded the Samuel C. Benedict Professorship at the College, tapped as the Interim Assistant Head for the Department of Pharmaceutical and Biomedical Sciences, received another U.S. patent, published in numerous journals, and made several professional presentations.

Joining the College in 2010, Dr. Kennedy’s current research focuses on allosteric disruption of kinases using novel stabilized peptide inhibitors for the treatment of a wide variety of diseases spanning from cancer to Parkinson’s disease to tropical diseases, including malaria.

During her tenure at the College, she has developed the first PBS Faculty Mentoring Committee, serving as chair since its inception.  As a teacher, Dr. Kennedy has been a course coordinator for numerous semesters and has mentored several undergraduate, graduate, and Pharm.D. students. She has published more than 45 peer reviewed articles in such highly-regarded journals as ACS Chemical Biology, ACS Infectious Diseases, EBMO Journal, Nature Methods, and Cancer Research. These publications are in addition to eight patents and patent applications. In addition, Dr. Kennedy has received more than $3.5 million in extramural funding, including a current R01 from the NIH in which she is the Pl; two Michael J. Fox Idea Awards in which she is the lead PI, a NIH P01 grant in which she is a Co-I, and a Department of Defense Cancer Research New Idea Award.

Her most recent patent was for “Disruption of the WAVE3 protein complex for suppression of invasion and metastasis.” Dr. Kennedy designed the inhibitors for this patent, which can be viewed here.  Her most recent article was in Science Signaling, “mTORC2 controls the activity of PKC and Akt by phosphorylating a conserved TOR interaction motif.”