IT all began with a deep-seated fascination with animals as an adolescent.
Before he knew it, Gerard Kennedy was a third-year behavioural science student working as an assistant to one of Australia’s first chronobiologists, Professor Stuart Armstrong.
“I’ve always loved animals and the outdoors,” he says. “I wanted to combine my interest in the behavioural aspects of animals and humans with the biological aspects.”
Now an associate professor at Victoria University in St Albans, the 57-year-old has completed landmark studies on human and animal ‘body clocks’ and sleep disorders.
Last year, he and fellow researcher Dr Greg Willis discovered that bright light therapy can slow or halt the progress of Parkinson’s disease by decreasing or blocking the hormone melatonin activity in the brain.
In 2010, he received global recognition for a report he presented at the Australasian Sleep Conference which examined the bizarre phenomenon of people having sex while asleep.
Dr Kennedy is one of the chief investigators in the ‘Sleep Health in Quadriplegia’ research program at the Austin Hospital.
Funded by a $5 million grant from the Transport Accident Commission, the collaborative research project aims to reduce disturbed sleep patterns faced by quadriplegics.
“Helping them with their sleep patterns is only a small thing compared to the large cross they already have to bear,” Dr Kennedy says.
“But it’s rewarding and exciting to improve their lives in some little way.”
However, he says it’s his role as a lecturer and mentor to hundreds of western suburbs university students that is his greatest achievement.
“It’s almost like being a father and watching all your children leave the nest because you’ve watched them grow in their chosen field.
”Some keep in contact and you hear all about what they are up to and others you run into along the way … or you end up working on research projects with them and they become your colleagues.”
Dr Kennedy is also a senior consultant psychologist at the Austin Hospital and Monash Medical Centre, where he hosts insomnia clinics.
