Dr. Kevin J. O'Donovan, Ph.D.

Dr. O’Donovan teaches courses in neuroscience, biochemistry, cell biology, biology, and general chemistry. 

After graduating summa cum laude with BS in biological sciences and a minor in chemistry from the University of North Texas in 1993, I earned my PhD in Neuroscience at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in 1999. There, using learning and memory paradigms in rodents, I studied how neuronal activity in the hippocampus and cerebral cortex induces a genetic program of DNA binding transcription factors, now known to be required for proper memory formation as well as being implicated in the pathogenesis of schizophrenia. For that work I earned the Mette Strand Research Prize. For another project at Johns Hopkins that stemmed from a collaboration with Dr. Raj Ratan, we had the privilege to work and publish with the future Nobel Laureate Dr. Gregg Semenza on a project working on how oxidative stress impacts neuronal survival. 

Following graduate school, I was a Charles H. Revson Postdoctoral Fellow in the Laboratory of Molecular Neuro-Oncology at Rockefeller University in New York City. At Rockefeller, I studied the etiology of paraneoplastic cerebellar degeneration (PCD), which is a devastating autoimmune attack on the nervous system that often begins with a tumor in other parts of the body. 

After a 5-year postdoctoral fellowship, I was promoted to Research Associate and remained in this position until 2009. Work on understanding disease progression has continued as evidenced by the recent publication in 2017 in the Journal of Clinical Investigation showing that there is a role for T cells in PCD.

In 2009, I accepted a faculty position at the Burke Neurological Institute in White Plains, NY. While at Burke, I was a Goldsmith Fellow and helped develop an active research program focused on understanding axonal growth during embryonic development. This approach enabled us to leverage our knowledge of developmental axon growth towards studies of adult axonal regeneration. These studies, published in 2014 as a cover article in the Journal of Experimental Medicine, demonstrated that a constitutively active signaling molecule B-RAF promotes robust regenerative axonal growth of injured adult neurons in the intact animal.