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

[2] 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.

[4] While a senior lecturer in biology at Melbourne State College in the 1970s, Kinnear wrote computer programmes to help teach genetics through simulations of animal breeding.

To further her understanding of the underlying mathematics of her programmes, she applied for the Graduate Diploma of Computer Simulation at Swinburne University of Technology, and was initially refused entry until she demonstrated her prior mathematical experience.

[5] Kinnear's education programmes for genetics include CATLAB, BIRDBREED and Heredity Dog.