Ken Rodgers trained as a pharmacist in the United Kingdom and had ten years experience in the pharmaceutical industry before embarking on an academic research career. After completing his Ph.D. studies in the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Sydney he was awarded a Pfizer postdoctoral fellowship and spent two years in the United Kingdom working with Dr Chris Jackson in the plaque rupture group at the Bristol Heart Institute and with Pfizer drug development in Kent.

In 1999 Ken returned to Australia to take up a Senior Research Officer position at the Heart Research Institute in Sydney with Professor Roger Dean. This resulted some seminal work on the cellular handling of oxidised proteins, made possible by the development of a novel experimental approach to generate oxidised proteins in cells. Ken was the head of the Cell Biology Research Group at the Heart Research Institute in Sydney from 2005 to 2011 where he published on the protein oxidation, incorporation of non-native amino acids into proteins, atherosclerosis and plaque rupture.

In February 2011 he joined the University of Technology Sydney as a senior lecturer in pharmacology. His research group, The Neurotoxin Research Group is located in the School of Life Sciences s at UTS, which is a well-equipped research collective. His main research interests are on how incorporation of non-protein amino acids into proteins could be an environmental trigger for neurodegenerative diseases such as motor neurone disease and multiple sclerosis.