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Robert T. Kennedy
Core_Faculty
Robert Kennedy is the Hobart H. Willard Professor of Chemistry and a Professor of Pharmacology at the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor. His research interests are in the area of analytical chemistry, microfluidics and their application to pharmacology. His group has pioneered the use of capillary electrophoresis (CE), capillary liquid chromatography (LC) and microelectrodes for the study of neurotransmitters and hormones at single living cells and in vivo. An important accomplishment was the development of a microelectrode that allowed insulin release to be monitored at single pancreatic beta cells. This method has since been used to study the mechanisms of secretion and its relationship to diabetes. The Kennedy group has also developed instrumentation that couples in vivo sampling methods with microfluidic analytical systems. This technique has allowed significant improvements in the in vivo detection of neurotransmitters. This development has opened the door to numerous studies on the neurochemical substrates for behavior. As part of this project, the group invented the CE-based immunoassay and a variety of other affinity based methods which have been used in clinical as well as basic research applications. More recently his group has developed a highly sensitive LC-MS method that has allowed neuropeptides to be monitored and discovered in the brain of living rats.
Professor Kennedy earned a B.S. in Chemistry at the University of Florida in 1984 and a Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina in 1988. After a two year stint as a NSF post-doctoral fellow, also at North Carolina, he served as a professor of chemistry at the University of Florida for 11 years. He has served on the editorial board of several journals including the Journal of Chromatography, The Analyst, and Electrophoresis. He has received several awards including the Presidential Faculty Fellowship, ACS Findeis Award, Benedetti-Pichler Award of the Microchemical Society, NSF National Young Investigator Award, Beckman Young Investigator Award, Lilly Analytical Research Award, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences Teacher of the Year Award, and Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship.
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Karen Smith
Core_Faculty
Karen Smith is a research scientist in the Nervous Systems Disorders Department at the Wadsworth Center, Albany, NY. For over 18 years, her career had been spent as an established in vitro electrophysiologist studying immature hippocampal neuronal networks pertaining to epilepsy.
More recently, her research has been in the field of nanobiotechnology. The focus of this research has been on the biological responses elicited as a result of the insertion and the presence of a neural prosthetic device. Ms. Smith leads the in vivo electrophysiology study involving cortical prosthetic devices, works in partnership on a cortical mapping and electrocorticography (ECoG) study, and investigates the changes in numerous biochemical markers seen in response to device insertion, chronic implantation, and stimulus-mediated changes.
Ms. Smith received her M.S. degree in biology from the New York State University, at Albany, in 1998. She is a Society for Neuroscience member, former President of the Hudson Berkshire Society for Neuroscience Chapter (2004-06), and current Vice President. Ms. Smith is a past recipient of a young investigators award from the American Epilepsy Society.
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