PHILADELPHIA – Renowned cardiac metabolism expert Daniel P. Kelly, MD, has been named director of the Penn Cardiovascular Institute, a multi-disciplinary group of researchers and physicians dedicated to scientific discoveries and medical breakthroughs in heart and vascular care. He will lead a cross-disciplinary team of basic, translational and clinical researchers, leveraging laboratory research to develop the next generation of therapies for cardiovascular disease.
Kelly joins Penn Medicine from Sanford Burnham Prebys Medical Discovery Institute (SBP) at Lake Nona near Orlando, where he began as the Institute’s founding scientific director in 2008. Under Kelly’s leadership the SBP-Lake Nona’s research program grew significantly, the organization established collaborative partnerships with academic institutions, industry, and health systems, and became a transformational driver in the development and expansion of science and medicine in Florida.
As a physician-scientist, Kelly has spent the majority of his career focusing on the metabolic origins of heart muscle diseases, specifically looking at the connection between gene regulatory circuits and complex acquired cardiovascular and metabolic diseases. In an effort to discover new therapeutic targets and biomarkers, the Kelly laboratory has focused on the use of genomic, proteomic, lipidomic, and metabolomic profiling of animal disease models and in human disease phenotypes to examine the pathways that regulate heart and skeletal muscle energy metabolism in search of new therapeutic targets.
“We are thrilled to recruit a leader off Dr. Kelly’s caliber to Penn, and we are confident that under his leadership, Penn will become recognized as the nation’s leading cardiovascular research center,” said Michael S. Parmacek, MD, the Frank Wister Thomas Chair of Medicine in the Perelman School of Medicine. “We are especially excited for the role Dr. Kelly’s particular expertise will play in catalyzing programs bridging the Penn CVI and Penn’s Institute of Diabetes, Obesity and Metabolism.”
In addition to his research and academic work, over the years Kelly has been involved with a number of professional organizations including the American Heart Association, the American College of Cardiology, the International Society for Heart Research, and the Association of University Cardiologists, among many others. He serves as an associate editor for the Journal of Clinical Investigation and the Journal of the American College of Cardiology: Basic to Translational Science, and is currently on the editorial board for Nuclear Receptor Signaling.
After earning his undergraduate degree in Biology from the University of Illinois, Kelly pursued his Medical Degree at the University of Illinois College of Medicine in Chicago. He did his residency training at Barnes Hospital in St. Louis before completing a postdoctoral research fellowship and a Clinical Cardiology Fellowship at the Washington University School of Medicine, also in St. Louis. Kelly spent a majority of his career in the Midwest, before moving to Florida to lead the evolution of the SBP-Lake Nona site. Kelly continues to serve as an Adjunct Professor of Medicine at the Washington University School of Medicine, and holds a faculty appointment at the University of Central Florida.
He will officially join Penn Medicine in August 2017.
Penn Medicine is one of the world’s leading academic medical centers, dedicated to the related missions of medical education, biomedical research, excellence in patient care, and community service. The organization consists of the University of Pennsylvania Health System and Penn’s Raymond and Ruth Perelman School of Medicine, founded in 1765 as the nation’s first medical school.
The Perelman School of Medicine is consistently among the nation's top recipients of funding from the National Institutes of Health, with $550 million awarded in the 2022 fiscal year. Home to a proud history of “firsts” in medicine, Penn Medicine teams have pioneered discoveries and innovations that have shaped modern medicine, including recent breakthroughs such as CAR T cell therapy for cancer and the mRNA technology used in COVID-19 vaccines.
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