Olga Kennard, crystallographer who set up an important medical database – obituary

Olga Kennard, who has died aged 98, was a Hungarian-born scientist who specialised in determining the structure of complex molecules using X-rays; she founded the Cambridge Crystallographic Data Centre (CCDC), and in 1987 became one of the first female Fellows of the Royal Society.

The CCDC, which she directed from its foundation in 1965 until 1997, is an internationally important repository of experimentally-derived three-dimensional crystal structures, and a vital resource for scientists in many different fields, including developing new drugs. In 1989 it became a charity.

The eldest of three children, she was born Olga Weisz in Budapest on March 23 1924 to Joir Weisz, a merchant banker, and Caterina, née Sternberg (the actress Rachel Weisz is a niece). In the late 1930s, alarmed by growing anti-Semitism in Hungary, the family moved to Britain; Olga, her mother and siblings arrived in August 1939, just before the outbreak of war.

From Hove County School for Girls and Prince Henry’s Grammar School, Evesham, Olga read Natural Sciences at Newnham College, Cambridge, graduating in 1944 at a time when the university refused to award degrees to women. When it changed its mind in 1948 she collected her MA.

From 1944 to 1948 she worked as a research assistant to Max Perutz at the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge on the structure of haemoglobin. As it was then considered unsuitable for a woman to take a doctorate at Cambridge (she would be awarded a DSc in 1973), she moved to London, working at the Medical Research Council Institute of Ophthalmology with Hamilton Hartridge, then as a research assistant at the MRC National Institute for Medical Research in Mill Hill.

There she established a crystallographic laboratory and, influenced by the physicist JD Bernal, she began to collate experimental crystallographic data – motivated, as she put it later, by “an intense belief that the community exploitation of data will lead to the discovery of new knowledge which surpasses the findings of individual investigations”.

On secondment from the MRC, in 1961 she returned to Cambridge, where she persuaded the chemistry department to buy a diffractometer to analyse the structure of small molecules through X-ray crystallography, and established a crystallography group.

As well as the CCDC, she founded the Cambridge Structural Database, a computerised database of 3D molecular structures derived from analyses going back to the 1920s, an enterprise which involved the laborious task of converting the structures into machine-readable form.

She and her team worked on a variety of medical compounds including antibiotics, and made an important breakthrough in solving the structure of adenosine triphosphate (ATP), an organic compound that provides energy to drive many processes in living cells, such as muscle contraction and nerve impulses.

She remained in the chemistry department until her retirement, publishing more than 200 scientific papers and several books. After CCDC became a charity, it moved into its own new building, for which Olga Kennard, who was also an expert in architecture, commissioned the Danish architect, Erik Christian Sørensen, who had previously designed her (Grade II listed) house. In 1993 the new centre won the Sunday Times building of the year award.

In retirement she served as a trustee of the British Museum. The Royal Society established a research fellowship in her honour and in 1988 she was appointed OBE. In 1993 she was elected a member of the Academia Europaea. At the time of her death she was due to receive the Gregori Aminoff Prize of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.

In 1948 she married David Kennard, with whom she had two daughters. The marriage was dissolved in 1961, and in 1993 she married Sir Arnold Burgen, the pharmacologist and former master of Darwin College, Cambridge, who died last year. Her daughters survive her.

Olga Kennard, born March 23 1924, died March 1 2023