Dr. Kelly, a cardiologist-scientist, joined the Washington University School of Medicine faculty in 1989 and rapidly moved up the ranks to Professor of Medicine, and Chief of the Cardiovascular Division and Director for the Center for Cardiovascular Research. In 2008, he assumed the role of founding Scientific Director for the Sanford Burnham Institute in Orlando, Florida. In 2017, he moved to the University of Pennsylvania to serve as Director of the Penn Cardiovascular Institute. Early in his career, Dr. Kelly defined the genetic basis for a common inborn error in mitochondrial fatty acid oxidation, work that led to the development of practical screening tests for newborns. Thereafter, he became interested in how similar derangements in cardiac fuel metabolism contribute to common acquired forms of heart failure and has defined master transcriptional regulatory mechanisms involved in the control of cardiac mitochondrial function through studies on nuclear receptors.