Jeffery W. Kelly

Who is Jeffery W. Kelly?

Jeffery W. Kelly is the former Dean of Graduate Studies and Vice President of Academic Affairs and currently is the Chairman of Molecular and Experimental Medicine and the Lita Annenberg Hazen Professor of Chemistry within the Skaggs Institute of Chemical Biology at The Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California. His work focuses on understanding protein folding, misfolding and aggregation and on developing both chemical and biological strategies to ameliorate diseases caused by protein misfolding and/or aggregation.

Kelly received his Ph.D. in organic chemistry from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and performed post-doctoral research at The Rockefeller University. His research focuses on the chemistry and biology of protein homeostasis or proteostasis. Besides studying the structural and energetic basis behind protein folding, his laboratory also studies the etiology of neurodegenerative diseases linked to protein aggregation, including Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's Disease, and the familial gelsolin and transthyretin-based amyloidoses–publishing over 295 peer-reviewed papers in this area to date.