Grace Kenney

Dr. Grace E. Kenney is an Assistant Professor at the University of Pittsburgh in the Department of Chemistry. As an undergraduate at MIT, Dr. Kenney was a student in the inaugural IAP synthetic biology course that eventually evolved into the iGEM program. To better understand the molecular underpinnings of biological systems, Dr. Kenney went on to earn an S.B. in Chemistry from MIT, after studying the chemotherapeutic natural product bleomycin in the laboratory of Dr. JoAnne Stubbe. As a graduate student, Dr. Kenney joined the laboratory of Dr. Amy Rosenzweig at Northwestern University, investigating the production and biological roles of copper-binding natural products produced by methane-oxidizing microbes. Support for this research came from several sources, including an American Heart Association Predoctoral Fellowship and a Northwestern University Presidential Fellowship. Prior to joining Pitt, Dr. Kenney was a postdoctoral research associate in the laboratory of Dr. Emily Balskus in the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology at Harvard University. Dr. Kenney’s postdoctoral work in the Balskus group focused on new enzyme families that form nitrogen-nitrogen bonds in diverse natural products; as a postdoctoral researcher, Dr. Kenney was a Merck Fellow of the Damon Runyon Cancer Research Foundation. The recently launched Kenney lab focuses on discovering and manipulating both new microbial enzymes and pathways that produce new types of microbial natural products.  Click here for more information on research in the Kenney lab.