Dr. Megan Kenna is the Founding Executive Director of Schmidt Science Fellows and is responsible for the overall strategic, financial, and operational leadership of the organization. She guided the rapid development and scaling of the organization from inception to becoming an internationally recognized program that Forbes magazine called – just seven years after its founding – “one of the most prestigious scientific postdoctoral awards in the world.”
Under her leadership, Schmidt Science Fellows is disrupting traditional ways of doing science to catalyze innovation, bridge across disciplinary boundaries, and help solve bigger scientific problems faster. The number of Schmidt Science Fellows selected each year and the funding available to them have doubled since the inception of the Program. The Fellows selected during her tenure have gone on to secure over $310M in startup funds for their companies, $64M in research grants, and 41 tenure-track faculty positions at top academic institutions including Caltech, Harvard, MIT, National University of Singapore, Northwestern, Stanford, and University of Toronto. Fellows have collectively published over 250 academic articles supported by Schmidt Science Fellows and have garnered more than 16,500 citations.
Megan also plays a crucial role in the senior leadership team of the Rhodes Trust, the prestigious organization that identifies and fosters rising leaders from around the world, participating in Board of Trustee meetings and helping to guide the strategic vision and operational delivery of the UK charity.
Recognized by the BBC as one of the top 5 women “shaking up the science world,” Megan is a leading voice in global science innovation with a creative vision and aptitude for building international partnerships. Megan conceived of and developed a partnership with Times Higher Education to create a new international ranking of universities by their support for interdisciplinary science, set to be published in November 2024, with over 1000 universities from 117 countries participating. This initiative aims to boost scientific innovation by recognizing, incentivizing, and celebrating academic institutions that engage in collaborative interdisciplinary science across the world.
Megan has dual doctorates in Physiology (Neuroscience) from the University of Oxford, where she was a Rhodes Scholar, and Clinical Psychology from the Catholic University of America. Her research has been published in renowned journals like Cortex and Nature Reviews Neuroscience. Megan’s work has been featured in mainstream media, including Scientific American Mind, Newsweek, and the BBC. She is also a Clinical Psychologist licensed in New York, Virginia, and Washington, DC. Before her tenure at Schmidt Science Fellows, Megan held various academic and administrative posts, including as a dean at Dartmouth College. She taught at Dartmouth College, the University of Oxford, and the Chicago School of Professional Psychology, owned a private psychology practice, and founded a Memory Disorders Clinic at the Washington DC Veterans Affairs Medical Center, significantly reducing wait times for Alzheimer’s Disease diagnoses by 85%.