Olga Kennard, Lady Burgen was a Hungarian-born British scientist who specialised in crystallography.
13 Facts About Olga Kennard
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Olga Kennard was the founder of the Cambridge Crystallographic Data Centre.
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Olga Kennard was involved, at CSD, in the founding of the Protein Data Bank, and of the EMBL nucleotide sequence data library.
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Olga Kennard was born in Budapest, Hungary on 23 March 1924, to Joir and Catherina Weisz.
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Olga Kennard moved to the United Kingdom at the age of 15 with her family in the face of growing antisemitism in Hungary.
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Olga Kennard attended Newnham College, Cambridge, studying Natural Sciences at a time when women did not formally receive a degree.
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In 1961 Olga Kennard returned to work in Cambridge to the University's chemistry department to set up a Crystallography Unit.
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Olga Kennard remained in this department until retirement but never held a University post as she was seconded from the MRC.
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Olga Kennard was best known as a founder of the Cambridge Structural Database and first director of the Cambridge Crystallographic Data Centre.
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Olga Kennard held an MRC special appointment from 1974 to 1989 and was visiting professor at the University of London from 1988 to 1990.
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Olga Kennard was awarded a doctorate of science by Cambridge in 1973 and elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1987 and appointed an Officer of the Order of the British Empire "for services to Scientific Research on the Structure of Biological Molecules" in the 1988 Birthday Honours.
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Olga Kennard was married to Sir Arnold Burgen, her second husband, until his death in May 2022.
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Olga Kennard was an 'architecture aficionado' and lived in a Grade II listed house designed by Danish architect, Erik Sorensen.