[1][2][3] Reed earned his Ph.D. at the University of Nebraska, was a professor of physics at Morehouse College, in Atlanta, Georgia and is known for his work related to ionization and atomic collisions in high temperature plasmas.
He maintained this role until 1980, when he joined Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), where he became a leading theoretical atomic physicist.
[6][7] Reed was also a visiting scientist at the Hahn-Meitner Institute in Germany and at the University College London in the United Kingdom.
Reed organized U.S. visits for African physicists including formal meetings and presentations at universities and high-level meetings in Washington, D.C. with government agencies such as the National Science Foundation, USAID, American Astronomical Society, and United States National Research Council and was on the international advisory panel for the African School on Electronic Structure Methods and Applications.
[4] He was president of the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics (IUPAP) from 2017 to October 2019 when he chose to step down for personal reasons.
[13] Kennedy Reed worked hard in the support of physics in Africa and in improving the participation and recognition of minority groups.