Consultant, Kevin Kennedy Associates Inc.
Providing expertise in research and development, synthetic organic chemistry, natural products, catalyst design, heterogeneous catalysis, surface plasmon resonance (SPR), drug design, and related expertise to a wide variety of clients.
Research Associate, major university
Organized and coordinated all aspects of a multi-million dollar project to design synthetic antibody systems for therapeutic and diagnostic applications. Proposed and developed a novel strategy for the screening of targets to be used to synthesize synthetic antibodies and affinity reagents using custom peptidic microarrays. Developed new techniques for pre-symptomatic diagnosis of diseases and designed new classes of therapeutic drugs. Successfully secured funding for a $750,000 Surface Plasmon Resonance instrument purchase - one of the first such instruments in an academic lab. Implemented new approaches for high throughput screening (HTS) for lead compound identification via label free detection - using surface plasmon resonance and resonant waveguide technologies. Organized and gave scientific guidance to the medicinal chemistry of the project, coordinating activities within laboratory and our collaborative partners.
Research Fellow, major university
Research area: Natural product synthesis of cancer therapeutics (Total Synthesis of Dolastatin 16). Responsibilities: Designing and implementing new synthetic routes to novel compounds with potential for cancer treatments, ensuring testing against cancer cell lines and supervision and training of research students. Retro-synthetic analysis of target compound and construction of viable synthetic pathways. Developed asymmetric catalytic enantioselective methods for the synthesis of unnatural amino acids via elegant rearrangement reactions. Extensive use of organo metallic chemistry, macrocylization, oxidations and reductions, homologation, metathesis. Use of 1H and 13C NMR, IR, M.S., HPLC, GC, X-ray crystallography and ICP analysis.
Research Chemist, University of Newcastle upon Tyne
Research area: Design and synthesis of chiral asymmetric heterogeneous catalysts for enantioselective carbon-carbon bond forming reactions. Synthesized several novel symmetric bisoxazoline (BOX) catalysts via directional approaches and evaluated in a variety of C-C bond forming reactions. Introduced a new modular approach toward the construction of two classes of unsymmetric catalysts. Successfully adapted catalysts for use in solid phase polymeric supports. Extensive use of hetrocycle formation, carbenes, ylids, pericyclic reactions, transition metal catalyzed coupling reactions. Experienced in inert double manifold handling techniques (schlenk).
Research Assistant, DuPont Automotive
Research project: Development of surface coatings for the automotive industry. Responsibilities: Planning and carrying out laboratory experimental work for automotive coatings, formulations, validating product specifications, supervision of surface coating production on plant scale, presenting results and conclusions to senior management of international automotive companies. Worked extensively with customer to develop the limited edition chromaflare pigment based automotive coating for a line of cars for Nissan UK.
