Class of 1956

Ivan Kennedy, son of a shearer, came to Aquinas from Clontarf as a day boy. A love of geometry, Euclid and the way the Christian Brothers challenged him to think creatively helped him at a time when his family life was disrupted by his parent's separation. It was the Brothers who decided he should go to university and diverted him from an unexciting life in the civil service.

A monitor from UWA assessed Ivan’s work while at Clontarf and told his teacher: “It was a standard he didn’t see at the university!” In his final year at Aquinas, he finished third in his year winning prizes for Australian History as well as History and Geography, securing six distinctions from seven subjects in the UWA entry examinations.

On leaving Aquinas, Ivan was granted a scholarship for study in Agricultural Science and went on to specialise in biological nitrogen fixation, a fascination that has stayed with him throughout his whole life. He graduated in 1962 publishing two papers in a biochemical journal from his undergraduate work, continuing his PhD for another three years in Perth. He, his wife Thea and their two baby sons set sail for the UK on the ocean liner Fairstar in mid-1965, embarking on a stellar global career in environmental science. Ivan took up a Post-Doctoral study at the Department of Biochemistry in Leicester where DNA research was in its infancy.

In 1966 he secured a Fulbright Fellowship at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana, publishing three papers on arrival and worked there for two years. A lecturing job at Sydney University brought him back to Australia in early 1968 and the next three of his five sons were born there.

Over the decades Ivan and his very supportive Dutch wife travelled the world on the back of his A-grade research. 1974 alone saw them travel to Nice, the Netherlands, back to Cap d’Antibes and finally back to Australia. His rise up the ranks of academia to Personal Chair of Research in 1995 included a Higher Doctorate at UWA in 1992 in the environmental impact of nitrogen cycling, and publishing the highly-cited book Acid Soil and Acid Rain in the UK.

Along the way, he advised and mentored at the Tianjin University of Science and Technology in the Food Engineering and Biotechnology department. Indeed, mentoring his almost 50 PhD students to excel has been a passion. As he says: “What I mainly gave the world is another generation of researchers. My students have gone on to be global leaders in industry and academia”. He was named a Member in the General Division in the Order of Australia in September 2019 for Higher Education in Agriculture.

Ivan Kennedy, now Emeritus Professor at Sydney University, is an inspirational and accomplished academic whose life details are too large for this page. He says looking back: “So much of environmental science lacks rigour. What I got from my school education was discipline, a global viewpoint and making sure I got the best out of it.” He devotes much of his time now to the science behind climate change. His ongoing slogan is “never2late”.