Scott Keeney

Scott Neal Keeney (December 3, 1965) is an American molecular biologist.

Early life and education Keeney was born on December 3, 1965, in Baltimore, Maryland. Growing up, he attended the Baltimore Polytechnic Institute and was allowed to use the laboratories at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health due to his mother's position as secretary in the Biochemistry Department. While attending Virginia Tech, Keeney came out as gay and enrolled at the University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley) for his PhD. After receiving his PhD from UC Berkeley in 1993, Keeney decided to switch fields and change his focus from mammalian cells to yeast. While attending a presentation on a paper written by Nancy Kleckner, he was inspired to apply for a post-doctoral position in her laboratory. In 2001, he was treated for a germ cell tumor and began collaborating with George Bosl and Robert Motzer on germ cell tumor biology. In 2021, he collaborated with Claeys Bouuaert to isolate the protein Spo11, and the proteins it interacts with, and co-published Structural and functional characterization of the Spo11 core complex.

Awards and recognition As a result of his research, Keeney was named a finalist for the 2007 Blavatnik Awards for Young Scientists. The following year, Keeney was selected as a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Keeney was elected to the National Academy of Sciences "for his quest to understand the mechanism of meiotic recombination and to determine how this process is coordinated with other events of meiotic prophase."

Personal life Keeney came out as gay during his senior year at Virginia Tech, and is a strong proponent of visibility of LGBTQ+ researchers in STEM.