Medina native helps Fredonia with new science complex

By Tom Rivers, Editor Posted 18 September 2014 at 12:00 am

SUNY Fredonia – A lecture hall in the new Science Complex at Fredonia State College will be named the Kelly Family Auditorium after a gift to the project from Medina native, Dr. Jeffery Kelly.

MEDINA – A Medina High School graduate who has become a prominent organic chemistry researcher is helping his alma mater, Fredonia State College, build a new science complex.

Dr. Jeffery Kelly graduated from Fredonia in 1982. He then earned his doctorate in organic chemistry at the University of North Carolina in 1986.

He heads The Kelly Laboratory at The Scripps Research Institute, one of the world’s largest independent, not-for-profit organizations focusing on research in the biomedical sciences. The SRI employs about 3,000 people in La Jolla, Calif. and Jupiter, Fla. Kelly works out of the campus in La Jolla.

Kelly also owns two pharmaceutical companies, said his mother, Janice Kelly-Mack of Medina.

“He’s done very well,” she said. “He’s worked very hard.”

Dr. Jeffery Kelly

Kelly returns to Fredonia and Medina three or four times a year to visit family and friends and to attend Fredonia board meetings. He is on the college’s board of directors.

He will attend the Oct. 17 ribbon-cutting for the new 92,000-square-foot science complex, a $60 million project. Kelly donated to have the 120-seat auditorium named for his family. The Kelly Family Auditorium is among many rooms in the new science center that won support from alumni and friends of the college in Chautauqua County.

The Kelly Laboratory discovered the first regulatory agency-approved drug that slows the progression of a human amyloid disease, and has made other breakthroughs.

Kelly was recognized with a Fredonia Alumni Distinguished Achievement Award in 2000. He has won numerous awards for his research, including in 2012 when he was the winner of the Murray Goodman Memorial Prize for Biopolymers and the Ralph F. Hirschmann Award in Peptide Chemistry from the American Chemical Society.

For more on Kelly, click here.