Brian K. Kennedy

Who is 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 P. 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.