Dr. Kelley is the managing director for the Foundation Fighting Blindness’ venture arm, the Retinal Degeneration Fund, with responsibility for all external investments that strategically align with the Foundation’s therapeutic mission. Prior to joining the Foundation, Dr. Kelley was a senior program officer with the Burroughs Wellcome Fund, where he developed and led multiple advisory boards for identifying and funding gaps in interdisciplinary science and translational medicine, and was director and head of discovery, preclinical and translational medicine, at Tengion, where he helped develop a cell and tissue-based engineering platform for the regenerative medicine company. Dr. Kelley earned a Bachelor of Arts in chemistry at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a doctorate in pharmacology and experimental therapeutics from Louisiana State University Health Sciences Center. He was an American Heart Association postdoctoral fellow at UNC Chapel Hill in Dr. Cam Patterson’s cardiovascular biology and translational genomics lab, and recently earned an MBA from the Fuqua School of Business at Duke University.
Russell Kelley, PhD, MBAManaging Director, RD Fund
