Kelly Borges

Kelly got involved in Fitness in Recovery while helping reestablish Penn Medicine’s affiliation with the American College of Sports Medicine (ACSM)'s Exercise is Medicine initiative. With experience in the fitness realm (personal training) and patient care (clinical research), she connected FIR with Penn Medicine’s Community Outreach program as well as the University of Pennsylvania’s Institutional Review Board. Through continued grant awards, she is working toward implementing multi-center studies to assess the effectiveness of specifically-prescribed exercise for improving mental health and addiction recovery across various populations.

Kelly has an academic background in physiology, neurobiology, and nutrition (University of Connecticut), as well as bioethics (University of Pennsylvania). Her broad research experience ranges from pre-clinical studies in animal neurophysiology (University of Connecticut) to Phase II-III investigational drug clinical trials in hospitalized human subjects (Yale University, University of Pennsylvania). She has maintained active membership in the ACSM's Alliance for Health and Fitness Professionals since joining as an undergraduate student. She established the first chapter of Exercise is Medicine (EIM) on UConn's campus in 2014 alongside the late Jeffrey Anderson MD, and, after graduating, represented the ACSM as an EIM Ambassador through her graduate studies at Penn and Yale. She is currently pursuing a dual medical degree and PhD at New York Institute of Technology.