Kennedy Reed, the 26th President of the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics (IUPAP), died on 20th June 2023. We mourn his passing, and we celebrate his contributions to IUPAP and his championing diversity in physics organisations in the US and around the world.
Kennedy served IUPAP for seventeen years. He started his work with IUPAP as a member of the IUPAP Commission on Physics for Development (C13) in 2002 and was the Chair of C13 2008-201. He attracted the first International Council for Science (ICSU) grant which IUPAP received. He was then elected as the IUPAP nominee to the ICSU Executive Board, and in that capacity served on the ICSU committee for their Regional Office for Africa.
He was elected as IUPAP President Designate at the General Assembly in 2015 and as President at the General Assembly in 2017, serving as the IUPAP President until his resignation on 2nd October 2019 because of the personal circumstances which made it impossible to continue in that position.
His long standing involvement in improving the participation and recognition of minority groups, particularly women and Black Physicists, was a focus of his work for IUPAP, from the time he joined C13. He had a particular interest in African physicists and African physics.
During his time on our Commission for Development (C13) and especially while he was chair of that Commission, he worked hard in the support of Physics in Africa. The biennial African School of Electronic Structure Methods and Applications (ASESMA), which commenced in 2010, was supported by many IUPAP Commissions, especially (C13) and the Commission on Computational Physics (C20). Kennedy, with the then Chair of C20, the late Peter Borcherds, and the Secretary of C20 James Gubernatis were instrumental in getting IUPAP to support ASESMA. The International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP) was the major sponsor of ASESMA, and many of the African and international physicists who were involved in the individual schools had spent some time at the ICTP. For Kennedy ASESMA was a link between his physics specialisation in atomic physics and his ambition to build up physics in Africa. There are approximately 40 participants in each school, many collaborations have been built up, and about 20 papers have been published as a result of each school.
He strongly supported the successful application with the International Union of Crystallography to ICSU for a substantial 3 year grant for establishment of the project Lightsources for Africa, the Americas, Asia, Middle East and Pacific (LAAAMP). LAAAMP is providing opportunities physicists and crystallographers from many countries which do not have their own lightsource to have time on external lightsources, growing the base of people who can use these important tools of modern science. He was a strong supporter of the proposal of a LightSource for Africa.
In 1987 the 16th IUPAP President Larkin Kerwin told the General Assembly that “We are, after all, the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics and, in the past we have tended to forget the Applied Part of our mandate.” His proposal to repair this was to require that each of our Commissions have an Industrial Vice President — a practice which soon fell by the wayside. Kennedy took up the challenge to IUPAP of paying more attention to Applied Physics and devoted much effort to establishing the working group on physics and industry.
IUPAP benefited greatly from the energy and leadership of Kennedy Reed.

The Union thanks his wife Jane, his daughter Lydia his son Lewis and the other members of his family for sharing Kennedy with us, and formally expresses its condolences to them.