Kennan has held positions in numerous institutions within the basic sciences, including as a faculty member at Georgetown University (Dept of Chemistry), Celera Genomics (during the human genome project), and at UCBerkeley and the Joint Genome Institute (genomics analysis of a soil microbe). Those several roles in science, plus previous work at two National Labs (Los Alamos and Livermore) allows her to see science from the inside out.
Her current work is to help science transition the very fabric of how we 'do' science in the United States. She feels that science, like every other sector of the global enterprise (Health, Food, Clean water,Banking, Housing, Climate Change, Loss of biodiversity), is undergoing cataclysmic stresses that call for fundamental choices to create the kind of future we want. Her model for change most closely follows that of Sir Roland Jackson, previous President of the Royal Society in the United Kingdom and current Director of ScienceWise, UK. It includes dialog, the use of Open Space, appreciative inquiry, and finding positive outliers.
She currently serves on the board of Innovation Tri-Valley Leadership Group (Northern California), TEDxLivermore, advisory board for Avatar Research Institute and the Open Science Alliance and is a founding board member for California HealthCorps. She is also a judge for the EastBay Innovation Awards (2103 & 2014). She has most recently been working at Åbo Akademi, Turku, Finland furthering her basic research in microbial genomics and inheritance patterns.