Judith Kinnear

Judith Kinnear (born 1939) is an Australian academic, a geneticist, and the first woman to head a New Zealand university.

Academic career Kinnear was educated at Kilbreda College in Melbourne, Australia, and holds a BSc, an MSc and a PhD in Genetics from the University of Melbourne. Her PhD was titled "The origin and inter-relationships of larval and imaginal proteins in Calliphora: a contribution to the study of gene action in insect metamorphosis." She also has a Bachelor of Education from La Trobe University. They went on to write an award-winning series of textbooks together, the Nature of Biology series. Kinnear's education programmes for genetics include CATLAB, BIRDBREED and Heredity Dog. As Vice-Chancellor of Massey University, Kinnear's relationship with the university council was reported to be strained at times. She retired in 2008 and returned to Australia.

In 2017 Kinnear was selected as one of the Royal Society Te Apārangi's "150 women in 150 words", celebrating the contributions of women to knowledge in New Zealand.

Selected works