Daniel Kelly, director of both the Perelman School of Medicine and Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia's Cardiovascular Institutes, was recently named a 2025 Distinguished Scientist by the American Heart Association.
Kelly, who is also the Willard and Rhoda Ware Professor of Diabetes and Metabolic Diseases, will receive this award at the AHA’s 2025 Scientific Sessions in November in recognition for his research on the metabolic mechanisms that drive cardiovascular disease. The AHA grants this designation to scientists who advance research in cardiovascular, stroke, and brain health.
At the Medical School and CHOP, Kelly oversees major research programs that investigate how the heart’s energy use becomes disrupted in disease. He identified the genetic cause of a condition that affects how the body “processes fats for energy in mitochondria,” which led to the creation of screening tests for newborns.
“Our work has moved from fundamental discovery to identification of new therapies that rebalance fuel metabolism in the failing heart, one of which has moved to human trials,” Kelly said in the Penn Medicine announcement.
Kelly began his career by studying rare childhood metabolic diseases and tracing how energy metabolism defects can lead to heart failure and “sudden death.” He later extended his work to broader cardiovascular conditions and has had a “career-long mission” to understand the metabolic origins of heart disease.
In addition to the 2025 AHA Distinguished Scientist award, Kelly has won many of the organization’s other awards, including the 2009 Basic Research Prize, 2008 Basic Cardiovascular Sciences Council Distinguished Achievement Award, and the 1995 Established Investigator Award.
Kelly was appointed director of the Penn Cardiovascular Institute in 2017. He leads the Dan Kelly Laboratory, which is jointly based at the Medical School and CHOP.
The lab’s major achievements include defining the genetic basis of human MCAD deficiency and discovering that the failing heart switches to using ketone bodies as fuel. One of his lab’s therapeutic strategies, aimed at correcting a failing heart’s fuel balance, is currently in clinical trials.
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This announcement comes a month after Barbara Riegel, professor emerita in the School of Nursing, was named a recipient of the AHA’s 2025 Clinical Research Prize, which will also be awarded at the Scientific Sessions in November.
