Kevin Connolly, Ph.D.

Professor Kevin Connolly returns to Minerva University after four years at Minerva Project, where he served as Director of Partner Programs, leading academic and executive programs for university and enterprise partners across the United States, Latin America, and the Gulf. He first joined Minerva in 2017 as an Associate Professor of Social Sciences and served as Director of Curriculum for the School of Social Sciences, leading its faculty and curriculum team. Before Minerva, Connolly was an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania, and a postdoctoral fellow with the Network for Sensory Research, an interdisciplinary network of perception researchers at Harvard, MIT, Toronto, Glasgow, and London. He earned his Ph.D. in Philosophy (Cognitive Science) from the University of Toronto and his B.A. in Philosophy from the University of Notre Dame.

Connolly's research is on perceptual learning: how experience changes what people perceive, and how expertise is acquired. He is the author of Perceptual Learning: The Flexibility of the Senses (Oxford University Press, 2019).

At Minerva Project, Connolly designed competency-based curricula, built and scaled executive and professional programs, and led faculty training and platform transitions for partner institutions.

Connolly teaches across the School of Social Sciences, the School of Natural Sciences, and the Master of Science in Decision Making and Applied Analytics program.