Grace Kenney won a New Investigator Grant

Grace Kenney, an assistant professor in the Kenneth P. Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences’ Department of Chemistry, has received a New Investigator Grant from the Charles E. Kaufman Foundation. These grants are awarded to researchers at the beginning of their independent careers who are pursuing basic scientific research.

Research in the Kenney lab uses biochemical, computational and microbiological approaches to explore new areas of microbial chemistry. Microbes are talented chemists, using enzymes to carry out challenging chemical reactions and frequently surpassing their human counterparts in their ability to perform these reactions with high precision. The complex compounds they produce have also been an ongoing source of antibiotics and chemotherapeutic agents.

In even the best-understood microbes, however, many enzymes, pathways and compounds remain entirely unstudied. Kenney’s group is mapping these uncharted areas of microbial chemistry, with a particular focus on identifying families of enzymes that use metals to carry out complex chemical transformations and on exploring families of natural products that are poorly detected by current techniques.

Before joining the Dietrich School faculty, Kenney was a Merck Fellow of the Damon Runyon Cancer Research Foundation, pursuing postdoctoral research at Harvard University. Kenney’s doctoral research at Northwestern University was supported by an American Heart Association Predoctoral Fellowship and was preceded by a bachelor’s degree in chemistry from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.