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Kelly Kent is a neuroscientist that connects her passion for the brain with everything she touches, including as a school board member, corporate creativity consultant, business-owner, speaker, runner, parent, wife, educator, volunteer, community activist, mentor and friend. 

For the past five years since she completed her PhD in the molecular mechanisms of stroke recovery, Kelly has been taking her experience and expertise garnered at higher educational institutions and applying them to the real world around her. While on the one hand, Kelly was pursuing her post-graduate work in autism at the University of Southern California, she was also simultaneously teaching and mentoring graduate and undergraduate students. Kelly taught neurobiology to psychotherapy graduate students at Antioch University in Culver City as well as psychology undergraduate students at Moorpark College in Simi Valley. The application of neuroscience to everyday life became especially literal when Kelly co-founded adaptEd Consultants along with Anne-Marie Cziko, a company that uses neuroscience to provide tools to drive individual and organizational growth.

All the while, Kelly was becoming more and more active in the Culver City, CA community where she is raising her children. As evidence has accumulated about the value that learning a language has for any developing brain, Kelly took on the founding and overseeing of an immersive Spanish instruction program at her neighborhood school. It wasn’t long after this that she was asked to run for school board. In November of 2015, Kelly Kent was the top vote-getter elected to the Culver City Unified School District Governing Board and since joining the board has brought her expertise in education and organizational culture to enhance the outcomes of all students.

Kelly is proud to be a present and accessible member of her community in many ways. She has most recently posed as a running-pants and ball-gown wearing Glenda, the Good Witch, from The Wizard of Oz in preparation for Culver City’s Centennial 5K race, as she is well-known for running and cycling as part of her healthy brain lifestyle.

At the center of it all, Kelly is grounded in her home life, where she lives in a two-house-on-one-lot piece of property along with her husband, two children and parents. Up until the recent loss of her grandmother, this property had the incredible fortune of housing four generations. Indeed, her beautiful and happy children benefit from this extended family communal living in a way that is unique in today’s day. Kelly believes in children being raised by a village, because diversity of philosophy as well as in every other way matters in contributing to the developing mind of any child. That village was not discovered by accident, but both curated and chosen when Kelly and her husband, Hector not only moved in with her parents, but moved to the wonderful, little village of Culver City within the giant metropolis that is Los Angeles.

EDUCATION

UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA – Los Angeles, CA     2005 – 2011
PhD, Neuroscience Graduate Program

RUTGERS UNIVERSITY – New Brunswick, NJ     1994 – 1998
Bachelor of Science with Honors, Psychology, Minor in Women’s Studies

RESEARCH

USC– Los Angeles, CA
Post-Doctoral Research Associate in Behavioral Neuroendocrinology     2011 – 2013
Graduate Dissertation Completion in Stroke Recovery     2006 – 2011

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY –New York City NY     2002 – 2005
Staff Research Associate II in Alzheimer’s Disease