Dr Olga Kennard OBE FRS (Lady Burgen)

Dr Olga Kennard is a crystallographer, Fellow of the Royal Society and former Director of the Cambridge Crystallographic Data Centre. A Research Fellowship of the Royal Society was established by the Trustees of the Centre to mark her retirement in 1997. After graduating from Newham College, Cambridge, Olga Kennard started research at the Cavendish Laboratory, with Max Perutz on human haemoglobin.

In 1948 she moved to London and worked first at the Vision Research Unit and subsequently at the National Institute for Medical Research. In 1963 she returned to the Department of Chemistry in Cambridge as External Staff member of the Medical Research Council. There she established the Chemical Crystallography Group working on the structures of increasingly complex molecules with biological relevance. She also started, in 1965, one of the first scientific data bases which eventually evolved into the independent Cambridge Crystallographic Data Centre, affiliated to the University. She was awarded the Cambridge ScD degree in 1973 and the Honorary LL.D in 2003.

Her interests are music, reading and architecture.