He matriculated from high school in 1962 with the highest score in the State, which earned him a £200 prize, which he used to buy a double bass to feed his jazz obsession.
[4] After matriculation, Kemp initially attended Teacher's College, funded by a South Australian Department of Education grant, but this did not suit him and he switched to studying science at the University of Adelaide.
His doctoral research into the way avian feather keratin genes are organized won him the William Culross Prize for the best thesis in any field at the university that year.
After completing his doctorate, he continued his research at the University of Adelaide for a year, which led to his feature article in the prestigious journal Nature as the sole author.
[5] In 1975, Kemp took a post-doctoral research position at the CSIRO Division of Plant Industry where he built his knowledge of molecular biology while he investigated Drosophila.
[4][6] In 1978 Kemp returned to Australia and he joined the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research (WEHI), working on immunoglobulin genes.
Some critics have commented that the WEHI group struggled to come to grips with the financial necessities of commercialising their research and funding "big science" projects.
In 1984, Kemp's team pioneered the use of pulse field gel electrophoresis to separate malaria chromosomes, which allowed them to understand the arrangement and structure of its genome.
[4] On the night of his twenty-first birthday, Kemp was introduced to a nursing student named Katherine Mary Wakefield, and the couple were soon married.