Dr. Kennedy’s research focuses on developing and using Next Generation Sequencing technologies to study human diseases. He is one of the primary developers of a novel Next-Generation Sequencing method, termed Duplex Sequencing, which increases the accuracy of NGS platforms by >10,000-fold. The Kennedy lab uses this technology to study the accumulation of mutations in aging and neurodegenerative diseases, as well as studying the effects of mitochondrial and cellular quality control pathways that may influence the frequency of somatic mitochondrial DNA mutations. In addition, the Kennedy lab is working to develop and validate Duplex Sequencing protocols that can be used for high accuracy genotyping of forensic DNA samples.