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

Dr. Kevin O’Donovan is an associate professor and biology program director in the Department of Chemical & Biological Science & Engineering at West Point. He teaches courses in neuroscience, biochemistry, cell biology, biology, and general chemistry.

After graduating summa cum laude with a Bachelor of Science in biological sciences and a minor in chemistry from the University of North Texas in 1993, he earned his Ph.D. in neuroscience at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in 1999.

At Johns Hopkins, using learning and memory paradigms in rodents, Dr. O'Donovan 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, he earned the Mette Strand Research Prize. In another project that stemmed from a collaboration with Dr. Raj Ratan, he worked and published with future Nobel laureate Dr. Gregg Semenza on research examining how oxidative stress impacts neuronal survival.

Following graduate school, Dr. O’Donovan was a Charles H. Revson Postdoctoral Fellow in the Laboratory of Molecular Neuro-Oncology at Rockefeller University in New York City. He studied the etiology of paraneoplastic cerebellar degeneration, or PCD, a devastating autoimmune attack on the nervous system that often begins with a tumor in other parts of the body.

After a five-year postdoctoral fellowship, he was promoted to research associate and remained in this position until 2009. His work on understanding disease progression continued, as evidenced by a 2017 publication in the Journal of Clinical Investigation showing that there is a role for T cells in PCD.

In 2009, Dr. O’Donovan accepted a faculty position at the Burke Neurological Institute in White Plains, New York. While there he was a Goldsmith Fellow and helped develop an active research program focused on understanding axonal growth during embryonic development. This approach enabled his team to leverage knowledge of developmental axon growth toward 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.