Kevin Connolly
Kennedy High School
About
Kevin Connolly teaches IB biology at Kennedy High School which is just down 55th street from Midway Airport. You’ve probably flown right over his classroom. 2017-2018 will be his eleventh year teaching and fifth year at Kennedy. Kevin grew up in Orland Park, IL. He is the son of Irish immigrants, Counties Mayo and Armagh, and spent his youth playing American and Irish sports, keeping his head down in parochial schools and cleaning up houses or hauling plywood for the family business. After college, (go Illini!) Kevin did a two year stint in the Peace Corps as an education consultant and radio shock jock in South Africa. When he got back home, Kevin went back to carpentry for a few years before getting his teaching certificate from National Louis University. Since then he has taught science, gotten married, had three kids and taken up smoking meat and gardening.
Kevin has been fortunate to spend his summer in the Microfabricated Tissue Models (MTM) laboratory headed by Dr. Salman Khetani. The MTM laboratory develops engineered liver systems that can be used to screen drugs for toxicity prior to human testing. He has especially enjoyed working side by side with the talented young engineers and scientists who work in the MTM lab. Kevin has designed his curriculum to give his students a taste of the engineering thought processes as well as the precise techniques of cell culturing and collecting data that he saw MTM scientists use everyday.